Bryan Caplan has the answer.

A old saying tells us, “Thank goodness we don’t get as much government as we pay for.”  I’m tempted to add, “Yes, and thank goodness politicians don’t actually do exactly what they promised.”  Dishonest politics is sordid, but honest politics is absolutely scary.

Read it.

The Republican who challenged Rep. John Murtha in 2008 says a top aide to the embattled Pennsylvania Democrat threatened to have him recalled to active duty in the U.S. Army so he could be court-martialed for engaging in politics while serving in the armed forces.

Bill Russell — who challenged Murtha in 2008 and intends to do so again in 2010 — said Murtha chief of staff John Hugya made the threat during a National Rifle Association event in mid-March.

Ret. Col. Gregory Ritch, a former Army Reserve officer who served as Russell’s commanding officer, said he heard Hugya make a similar threat in January.

John Murtha (D., Pork) is just the gift that keeps on giving … or is that “keeps on taking”?

Read it.

Imagine that.

Read it.

“In spring 2006 the French government arranged for three bears from Slovenia to be released into the forests near Arbas,” Arcangeli tells me. “Two others were released near other villages. Gendarmerie intelligence warned us that there might be a few protesters, mostly farmers worried about their sheep being attacked. But 250 turned up, smashing anything they could find outside the town hall, trying to break in, spraying paint and throwing bottles of blood. Eighty gendarmes tried to keep order.”

The plan, agreed between Spain, France and Andorra, had been to introduce 15 bears over three years but since the Arbas riots no more have been released.

I guess the protests worked.

Read it.

When earlier this week President Obama signed a $410 billion spending bill to keep the government running through the fall, every account of the event noted the 800-pound contradiction in the room. Mr. Obama had campaigned against earmarks, even saying he would cut them back to levels before 1994, the start of the Gingrich-GOP interregnum. Now here was Obama as president signing a bill soaked in earmarks.

Here’s another way of putting it: The U.S. budget is now history’s biggest mountain of swag; it is uncountable goodie bags filled with tax revenue. Mr. Obama’s swag mountain, the fiscal year 2010 “budget,” is $3.59 trillion high (25% of total GDP of about $14 trillion). His $800 billion stimulus bill was another pile of public cash. We the people have concluded that if we don’t use the Honorable John or Nancy or Ted in Congress to get our piece of it, someone else will get it.

Barack Obama isn’t a reformer. He’s the president of Earmark Nation. We are about to enact the Obama federal health-insurance entitlement, which on top of all the other entitlements and their limitless liabilities will require pulling trillions of dollars more into the federal budget. Whatever nominal public good this is supposed to achieve, it means that they, these 535 pols, most of them gerrymandered for life, will decide in perpetuity the details of how to dole it out.

Read it.

The ancient city of Canterbury has found itself the subject of a complaint from homosexual rights activists for not having a gay bar.

Well, if gay is the new black, then they need quotas, right?

Read it.

Those are going to be hard genes to live with. Not to mention the embarrassment.

Read it.

And is that necessarily a bad thing? After all, how many people really need hand-made barrels, after all?

Read it.

Large places like the U.S. and Europe can survive the fantasies of their ruling classes about environmental pseudo-science; small countries who mistake decadence for sophistication may not. Here’s a classic case.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Apparently these people have never heard of x-ray machines.

“Duh, we’re from the government, and we’re here to help.”

Read it.

Students at Oxford University have been banned from reading books on the top shelves of the Bodleian library because the step-ladders used to reach them are against health and safety rules.

Steve Sailer distills the essence.

The conventional wisdom of the Obama Era appears to be that the solution to black underachievement is that we should take poor black children away from their mothers for as long as possible each day and turn them over to nice white people with liberal arts degrees for almost their entire waking hours.

Yeah, that about sums up the entire program of the Ruling Class.

Read it.

Pretty bad when a bunch of Arabs have more respect for European history than Europeans do.

Read it.

Darwin Award waiting to happen.

Read it.

Well, I’m certainly impressed.

Read it.

The horror! The horror!

Read it.

Arnold Kling ponders the fact that money from the federal government is now the biggest source of revenue for state and local governments.

My prediction is that this will persist even when there is a recovery. It is bad news in many respects. It makes the spenders (in this case, state and local governments) even less accountable for making sure that money is well spent. For the politicians, the incentive to spend other people’s money is big enough when its your own constituents paying the taxes, and it’s even bigger when someone else’s constituents are paying the taxes.

Read it.

And who could blame them? They’ve been down this road before, and it’s full of potholes.

As to “where would they go?”, the classic answer is Switzerland. Or buy a Third World nation somewhere.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

‘Qui procul hinc,’ the legend’s writ,—
The frontier-grave is far away—
‘Qui ante diem periit:
Sed miles, sed pro patria.’

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.

Rail systems promoted by lovers of mass transit suffer from especially high rates of lying. What does this tell us about the most enthusiastic mass transit supporters?

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

Probably just as well — it’s not as if they had, like, you know, teachers.

Read it.

What further sign of the End Times do we need?

Read it.

A Labour Party member who expected to be able to stand for election in a local race was denied the opportunity because she was too white — and too Jewish.

All indications are that this well-meaning woman is a whole-hearted supporter of Multiculturalism. Which means that she should have known the rules: political offices, like other spoils, are dealt out on a racial and religious basis. Whites and Jews are not part of the equation in her little corner of Multi-Land, so she had no business expecting things to be any different.

Holman Jenkins reveals an inconvenient truth about the auto industry.

The erosion of the Big Three’s market share since then has really been the erosion of the market for monopoly labor-produced cars. The UAW standard tactic, “pattern bargaining,” which it pursues without embarrassment, would have gotten Bill Gates thrown in jail under the antitrust laws.

In a real bankruptcy, which is the natural fate of companies unable to meet their obligations, Chrysler and GM would be run (or liquidated) for the benefit of their creditors, not their workers. But, here, “pattern bargaining” will remain the law of the Detroit jungle. The UAW will continue to use its unnaturally augmented clout to extract uncompetitive pay and benefits (it can do no other given its internal incentives). As it has for 40 years, Washington will pitch in with one improvisation after another, disguised as energy policy, trade policy, health-care policy or environmental policy, to stop the rivets from popping off. Politics, especially Democratic electoral politics, will play a more dominant role than ever.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Steve Sailer turns over the rock of government education.

When it finally dawns on Obama that if we actually start firing worse teachers and hiring better teachers, we’ll be, on net, firing blacks and hiring whites, you can expect this whole effort to get buried so far under affirmative action that nothing good comes of it.

Read it.

I don’t blame them.

Read it. And laugh.

Read it.

Well. There it is.

Read it.

I’ve always wondered why drug smugglers didn’t start using submarines earlier. These are only semisubmersible and so aren’t true submarines. And, of course, with government tax laws chewing on people who buy luxury boats, boatyards will be turning to such business more and more in order to stay in business.

Your tax dollars at work. Use the law to create a profitable market opportunity, then use that “problem” as an excuse to expand government activity — oh, and government spending, of course.

Read it.

Lisa Ashton, who worked for BMI, was told that she was expected to wear the abaya, a long black robe that leaves only the face uncovered, when she was out in public in the Gulf state.

She was also told that she should walk behind male colleagues irrespective of their rank, in order to conform with the social codes of the conservative country.

In her letter of dismissal, BMI said it was “proportionate” to ask female employees to walk behind men out of respect for Saudi culture.

An employment tribunal in Manchester earlier cleared BMI of sexual discrimination saying it was justified in imposing “rules of a different culture” on staff.

It ruled there was no evidence that women would regard BMI’s requirements on wearing the abaya, or walking behind men, as “placing them under any disadvantage.”

Moral: Don’t fly BMI, the official dhimmi airline of not-so-Great Britain.

Read it.

Gee, I wonder why?

Read it.

Well, those cousin-dating fundamentalist Southern rednecks have really crossed the line, now….

They are looking for George Zinkhan, a professor in the Department of Marketing and Distribution at the University of Georgia.

He is described as a white man with a goatee, last seen wearing a polo shirt and blue shorts, and may be traveling in a red car.

Oh, wait, that can’t be right….

Mr Hardy says his son told him that the victim, his friend Tom Tanner, was shot twice — once in the front and the back. “At 22 you’re not supposed to watch people die,” he said.

Tell it to the Marines, kid.

Read it.

If al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest of the Looney Tunes brigade want to kick America to death, they had better move in quickly and grab a piece of the action before Barack Obama finishes the job himself. Never in the history of the United States has a president worked so actively against the interests of his own people – not even Jimmy Carter.

Pretty bad when even British journalists are noticing.

Obama’s problem is that he does not know who the enemy is. To him, the enemy does not squat in caves in Waziristan, clutching automatic weapons and reciting the more militant verses from the Koran: instead, it sits around at tea parties in Kentucky quoting from the US Constitution. Obama is not at war with terrorists, but with his Republican fellow citizens. He has never abandoned the campaign trail.

Well, that sounds like a typical Democrat to me.

Read it.

Turns out that trains are like organic food — a costly option being foisted on the public by people who would like to cancel about the last century of progress. (How did these guys steal the name “progressive”, anyway?)

The enduring problem of “mass transit” is that it’s inefficient from the point of view of the passenger — it takes you from point A, which is probably not where you live, to point B, which is probably not where you want to be, at a time that is convenient to somebody else. Thus the enduring popularity of individualized transportation like automobiles, despite constraints like air pollution and traffic congestion; the history of America is proof that people will put up with quite a bit of inconvenience to get freedom.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Who could possibly have imagined back when the solons of California came up with the idea of having a high school exit exam that NAMs would fail it at a higher rate? And that girls would do worse at math than boys? That’s just crazy talk!

Surprise, surprise.

The study by researchers at Stanford University and UC Davis concluded that girls and non-whites were probably failing the exit exam more often than expected because of what is known as “stereotype threat,” a theory in social psychology that holds, essentially, that negative stereotypes can be self-fulfilling.

There certainly couldn’t be any other explanation.

Stanford has a School of Education? Who knew? Wouldn’t it be fun to hear what Stanford’s Electrical Engineering Department professors say in private about the quality of their colleagues in the Education Department?

Read it.

A German mother who abandoned her three small children at a pizzeria in northern Italy at the weekend when she went outside to smoke a cigarette with her boyfriend was found on Thursday wandering in the woods, Italian police said.

Read it.

Now comes further evidence of this effect. Two days ago, economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund published an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examining the ratio of male to female births in “U.S.-born children of Chinese, Korean, and Asian Indian parents.” Among whites, the boy-girl ratio was essentially constant, regardless of the number of kids in a family or how many of them were girls. In the Asian-American sample, the boy-girl ratio started out at the same norm: 1.05 to 1. But among families whose first child was a girl, the boy-girl ratio among second kids went up to 1.17 to 1. And if the first two kids were girls, the boy-girl ratio among third kids went up to 1.5 to 1. This 50 percent increase in male probability is directly contrary to the trend among whites, who tend to produce a child of the same sex as the previous child.

There’s no plausible innocent explanation for this enormous and directionally abnormal shift in probability. The authors conclude that the numbers are “evidence of sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stage.”

If you think of yourself as a techno-progressive—someone who believes, as Barack Obama does, that “maximizing the power of technology” will help fix everything from energy to the environment to health care—the increase in sex selection should give you pause.

Technology can facilitate regression as easily as it facilitates progress.

Oh, really? Imagine that.

Read it.

And subscribe to the RSS feed.

Read it.

Beware of birds with butts.

Read it.

All those Commies on the list?

Turns out they were Commies (and Soviet agents) after all.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

n September 2006, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Codie Stott, asked a teacher if she could sit with another group to do a science project as all the girls with her spoke only Urdu. The teacher’s first response, according to Stott, was to scream at her: “It’s racist, you’re going to get done by the police!” Upset and terrified, the schoolgirl went outside to calm down. The teacher called the police and a few days later, presumably after officialdom had thought the matter over, she was arrested and taken to a police station, where she was fingerprinted and photographed. According to her mother, she was placed in a bare cell for 3 1/2 hours. She was questioned on suspicion of committing a racial public order offence and then released without charge. The school was said to be investigating what further action to take, not against the teacher, but against Stott. Headmaster Anthony Edkins reportedly said: “An allegation of a serious nature was made concerning a racially motivated remark. We aim to ensure a caring and tolerant attitude towards pupils of all ethnic backgrounds and will not stand for racism in any form.”

Well. There it is.

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

Read it.

Mary Reason, 73, returned home from shopping to find her front door smashed down and a squad of police waiting.

The pensioner was due to give evidence at court but officers became concerned when she failed to contact witness services for three days.

Police broke down the door to her home in Staverton, near Gloucester, then billed Mrs Reason for £100 to pay for the cost of repairing the damage.

Now the pensioner is refusing to pay.

I’m a pensioner who has had a stroke and I shouldn’t have to deal with stuff like this from the police,” she said,

“They had no reason to break in. I get home and I find them in the house. The curtains were open and everything was neat and tidy.

“They could have just walked round and seen there were no problems. I won’t be paying – I shouldn’t have to.”

Well. There it is.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. (Oops — it already does, wherever fine drugs are sold.)

Read it.

Well, really, it’s a Communist dictatorship. What did you expect?

Read it.

Quite frankly, I’m surprised that they don’t have them already.

Hmmm. Perhaps they do — but just aren’t telling anybody.