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Their motto is “Be Prepared” but Scouts will soon have to survive without their trusty penknives on camping trips thanks to Britain’s growing knife crime culture.

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

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

Crew members of the Arctic Sea have since told Russian news reporters that they have been told not to disclose “state secrets” further fuelling the speculation.

A Russian military source told The Sunday Times: “The official version is ridiculous and was given to allow the Kremlin to save face.

Hmmm.

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The collapse of Lehman Brothers, a year ago this week, was the biggest bankruptcy in corporate history. It was 10 times the size of Enron and, more crucially, the tipping point into the global crash, provoking panic in an already battered financial system, freezing short-term lending, and marking the start of the liquidity crisis.

Yet searching questions remain unanswered. Authorities had intervened on both sides of the Atlantic to rescue a litany of stricken institutions, from Northern Rock to Bear Stearns, and mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, so why let Lehman go down? And was a rescue by Barclays effectively blocked by the UK authorities?

Indeed. Some people get bailed out, some people get their heads stepped on as they’re circling the drain. Wonder why?

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Hint: Yes.

It has been a half-century since have we seen a presidential inner circle so identified with our densest urban centers. The three most recent Democratic presidents — Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — all had substantial roots in small-town America that also helped them understand the aspirations of middle-class suburban and exurban voters.

In contrast, this is an administration steeped in the mystique of big cities. Chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is a tough-guy player from the variously effective and consistently corrupt Chicago city machine. The members of the Cabinet and top-tier apparatus are longtime residents of such large cities as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston and, of course, Chicago.

Yet for the most part, the big media have been too captivated by the president’s urbane mystique to delve too deeply into the Chicago morass. Largely denizens of big cities, the top media generally embrace the notion that dense urban places are inherently better, more efficient, culturally and environmentally sound than less glamorous, more spread-out places.

You can see this worldview almost daily in The New York Times or, more substantially, in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly and The New Republic, where writers often like to envision an American future bright for top-tier cities and pretty bleak for everyone else.

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The term ‘vegilante’ almost redeems with its cleverness the degenerative effect that it and similar locutions have on our culture. It is by such small and pleasant steps that we descend further and further into the Pit, until at last we grasp that we have laid up for ourselves, chip by chip, a future of discontent and shallow vacuity.

The Other McCain can always be counted on for pithy expression.

Welcome to the Obama Nation, where all criticism is subject to the accusation of raaaaacism. If Obama throws Jones under the bus, the Leader’s minions will depict it as a sop to right-wing hatemongers, and Jones will walk away with a platinum Victimhood Card, immediately redeemable for a six-figure book contract.

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Gotta watch out for that sort of thing.

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And this is, of course, an Important Subject, worthy of our attention.

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At a town-hall meeting in Portsmouth, N.H., last month, our uninformed lawyer in chief suggested that we physicians would rather chop off a foot than manage diabetes since we would make more money doing surgery. Then President Obama compounded his attack by claiming a doctor’s reimbursement is between “$30,000” and “$50,000” for such amputations! (Actually, such surgery costs only about $1,500.)

Physicians have never been so insulted. Because of these affronts, I will gladly volunteer for the important duty of controlling and regulating lawyers. Since most of what lawyers do is repetitive boilerplate or pushing paper, physicians would have no problem dictating what is appropriate for attorneys. We physicians know much more about legal practice than lawyers do about medicine.

This is pretty funny.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Allotment holders in Southampton have been told by their council that barbed wire will not be put up to protect their crime-plagued plots in case vandals hurt themselves.

Uh, I sort of thought that was the point?

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Oh, I’m sorry, it already is, along our sourthern border. Forget I even mentioned it.

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The great buildings of universities and cities alike are sermons in stone.  They aim to teach us something about the the fundamental commitments of an institution or a city or polity as much as what might take place inside those buildings.  And in the honor we bestow through the names we associate with such monuments, a society teaches something of significance to successive generations.   I would be the first to praise the generosity to a benefactor, and to encourage people of means to support a worthy cause – and it is meet to show gratitude in a fitting form.  Today, however, an older ethic of according honor  for lifetime service and sacrifice – or, more homely still, testimony to the geography of local places (e.g., Three River Stadium, now PNC Park) –  is increasingly crowded out in a race to leverage naming rights to the highest bidder.  What lesson are we teaching to our young through such sermons in stone?

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Note the implicit distinction between “Germany” and the German government. That’s what it feels like to be a European. That’s why our political establishment wants to be “more European”.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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China currently accounts for 93 percent of production of so-called rare earth elements — and more than 99 percent of the output for two of these elements, dysprosium and terbium, vital for a wide range of green energy technologies and military applications like missiles.

Perhaps we ought to ask the Chinese what it’s like to have a government with a foreign policy based on the country’s own interests.

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The tolerant outlook of an Arab with the democratic impulses of an African – a winning combination.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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

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I seem to remember hearing once that George Washington advised not getting involved in the fights of Europe….

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As the Labor Department’s Web site notes, the original intent for the holiday was a parade that would illustrate “the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations.” Over the years, however, Labor Day has morphed into little more than a three-day weekend signaling the end of summer.

So essentially it’s a semi-socialist pro-organized-labor holiday.

George Will has Barack Obama’s number.

In August our ubiquitous president became the nation’s elevator music, always out and about, heard but not really listened to, like audible wallpaper. And now, as Congress returns to resume wrestling with health care reform, we shall see if he continues his August project of proving that the idea of an Ivy League Huey Long is not oxymoronic.

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…which is perhaps why we ought not to take artists seriously when they talk about politics.

Hitler’s deluded view of himself as a genius is based on the confused system of thought emerging in the late 19th century, which centered on the idea that a genius — a strong personality who outshone everything else — could do anything and could do anything he pleased.

Sounds like a Kennedy.

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The real thing, this time: leaked British diplomatic correspondence published in the London Times appears to make it clear that Great Britain let Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi go in order to finalize an oil deal with Libya….

So where are all the Hollywood celebs with their Concerned T-shirts? Barbra? Viggo?

Apart from anything else, it is an argument for the death penalty. We simply can’t trust any Western government to be immune from bribery.

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Hey, if it were easy, anybody could do it. Oh, wait….

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Merely reinforcing what John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, always says: “Get a government job!”

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According to a researcher with anti-spam company Cloudmark, 419 fraudsters have been relaying a “significant” amount of messages through the democrats.org domain name. The abuse, which dates back at least to the beginning of this month, helps evade filters that internet service providers employ to block the messages.

Birds of a feather….

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A 10-year-old homeschool girl described as “well liked, social and interactive with her peers, academically promising and intellectually at or superior to grade level” has been told by a New Hampshire court official to attend a government school because she was too “vigorous” in defense of her Christian faith.

New Hampshire is now officially a Blue State.

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Google has anointed an “approved list” of writers it thinks you should read. But not only is Google’s choice far from “Neutral” – there’s no libertarians, merely one (shrieky and not very representative) conservative, and a preponderance of Greens – there isn’t a Google critic amongst them. Well, there goes “neutrality”.

The tech pundits Google chooses are safe, flavourless, humourless, and uniformly Google-friendly – it’s a list of Google’s trusted pals, really. If you locked them in a room with some drugs, by the end of the evening you’d have heard no new original insight or wit – and the drugs would be untouched. For example, Chris “Long Tail” Anderson tops the list. Do you need to know more?

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The 48-year-old, who can’t be named for legal reasons, is demanding unlimited damages of more than £300,000 from his ex-wife and her lover, for the distress caused and the cost of bringing up the children he believed were his for more than a decade.

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Of course, pretty soon in France it will only be necessary to say “I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you”, so it doesn’t really matter.

Foud Ajami nails it.

A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the “loudest voices” are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed.

The Obama devotees were the victims of their own belief in political magic. The devotees could not make up their minds. In a newly minted U.S. senator from Illinois, they saw the embodiment of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Like Lincoln, Mr. Obama was tall and thin and from Illinois, and the historic campaign was launched out of Springfield. The oath of office was taken on the Lincoln Bible. Like FDR, he had a huge economic challenge, and he better get it done, repair and streamline the economy in his “first hundred days.” Like JFK, he was young and stylish, with a young family.

Darwin Award nominee.

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An excellent breakdown — no pun intended — of federal receipts and expenditures, with some nifty graphics.

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If you can’t get a Government Job, working for one of these companies is probably the next best thing.

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Ah, more of that right-wing vigilante-ism … oh, wait a minute….

Nat Hentoff shivers.

I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama’s desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model) — as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill — decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It’s already in the stimulus bill signed into law.

The Obama Nation is starting to scare even left-wing media bloviators.

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The late Robert Crunden got to the heart of Progressive faith when he discovered that almost all American Progressives were raised in Calvinist homes and, under the influence of some combination of the men and women of Croly’s moment, lost their Christianity and replaced it with some form of what they thought of as “science.” Democracy, activated through science, became what religion once was. Seeing a world that had changed so much since about 1850 — Henry Adams said that a boy born in 1850 was born closer to the year zero than to 1900 — and a generation that had conquered the night (electricity), geography (trains and automobiles and airplanes) and even nature itself, which was for the first time vulnerable to the whims and ambitions of human reason, Progressives had some grounds for their optimism about their belief in “mastery” as opposed to “drift,” as Walter Lippmann put it.

The swine.

Everything hums along like clockwork as long as consumers consume. A wrench is thrown into the entire affair if consumers choose not to spend. And so, we find economists worrying that the genius of the stimulus is threatened by a reticence among Americans to open their wallets. This, of course, raises a whole set of further questions: what would happen to the economy if Americans began to barter for, rather than purchase, at least some of the things they need? What if neighbors began, say, sharing mowers, roto-tillers, ladders, and other tools rather than filling every garage in the neighborhood with same items? What if more Americans began growing some of their own food, making do with one car rather than two, eating at home, and generally attempting to live lives characterized by simplicity and frugality? If Americans are already beginning to make changes in this direction, are they recklessly threatening the economic recovery?

Andrew Breitbart looks at the SWPL clientele of Whole Foods.

Everywhere one looks these days, the intolerance of self-avowed liberals is on display. Especially since Mr. Obama came to power.

The purportedly open-minded and empathic among us who now run everything – save for NASCAR and Nashville – openly wage war against those who dare disagree.

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Gambetta argues that criminals often cover themselves with tattoos precisely because they ruin the criminals’ prospects to go straight; they allow the criminals to signal “that defection would be not so much unprofitable as impossible.”

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And yet the “Democrats” want more of the same. That’s “democracy” in these United States.

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As Mencken put it, Holmes was no “advocate of the rights of man,” but rather “an advocate of the rights of lawmakers.” With rare exceptions, he ruled that legislators could do almost anything they wanted, even if it contrasted the plain text of the Constitution, or the original meaning. Mencken accurately points out that under Holmes’ judicial philosophy, “there would be scarcely any brake at all upon lawmaking, and the Bill of Rights would have no more significance than the Code of Manu.”

Hear, hear.

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

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Unless there’s a Society for Creative Anachronism blog out there, can you really top an online video in which Glenn Reynolds interviews a sci-fi author and discusses, inter alia, “the suckiness of the Starship Troopers movie”?

Well, it’s a good interview, but McCain obviously doesn’t know that his “SCA buddies” almost certainly got laid a lot more than he did. Just sayin’.

Arnold Kling points out that there is really nothing new under the sun.

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This sort of thing is why I checked out of the culture around 1980. Our country is being taken over by aliens, and I don’t mean the guys from Mexico.

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Now, what kind of a moron doesn’t know to put the car in neutral and coast back to the level portion of the highway? This one ought to have been a Darwin Award nominee.