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Well, I’m glad to know that Britain is doing so well financially that they can piss away 100 million pounds on South African roads. Must be nice. Perhaps they could help us out over here.

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Oh, you mean that the spread of HIV is actually caused by individual behavior? Gee, you’d never know that from reading the newspapers — or from listening to the whining of the gay rights groups.

Or maybe it’s just heterosexual AIDS that is caused by individual behavior — homosexual AIDS droppeth like the rain upon the just and the unjust alike. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

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The latest hijacking happened on Saturday 400 nautical miles (740 kms) off the southern Somali port of Kismayu, between the Seychelles and Kenya, a regional maritime group said.

Makes you wonder why they send ships into this area, where they know pirates are operating with apparent impunity.

Needless to say, 100 years ago this problem would have already been taken care of.

Tyler Cowen looks at the bailouts — and their deficiencies.

But there is a big hole in these proposals, as there has already been in the government’s approach to bailing out failing financial companies. Even as they focus on firms deemed too big to fail, the new proposals immunize the creditors and counterparties of such firms by protecting them from their own lending and trading mistakes.

What the banking system needs is creditors who monitor risk and cut their exposure when that risk is too high. Unlike regulators, creditors and counterparties know the details of a deal and have their own money on the line.

But in both the bailouts and in the new proposals, the government is effectively neutralizing creditors as a force for financial safety. This suggests a scary possibility — that the next regulatory regime could end up even worse than the last.

Read it.

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

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College graduates are now looking toward government to start their careers, since there aren’t a lot of other places to look. Unemployment for government employees is about half the rate of almost all private industry workers, and Washington, D.C., is a rare U.S. city that seems recession-proof.

When working for the government is the best job out there, you are officially a Third World country. Just so you know.

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Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

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Our aim today is to restore narrative coherence to the 20th century, ridding it of mystical obfuscations, poltergeists, and winds of change. In UR’s 20th century, when things happen, they generally happen for a reason. The reason is generally the obvious reason.

The 20th century was the golden age of lies. The liars of the 20th century, like the painters of the 16th, will be remembered forever as the Old Masters of their art. I know UR has many readers who are Christians or Jews, and sometimes I even regret my own inability to believe in God. But no one who knows anything about the 20th century can fail to believe in the Devil.

Thus the standard story of the 20th century includes one set of actors which are portrayed accurately (the fascist regimes), one set which was portrayed inaccurately but has since been repaired with the assistance of whiteout (the revolutionary regimes), and one set whose mythos remains gloriously intact (the democratic regimes). From this stew, clarity is not to be expected.

A conservative is someone who helps disguise the true nature of a democratic state. The conservative is ineffective by definition, because his goal is to make democracy work properly. The fact that it does not work properly, has never worked properly, and will never work properly, sails straight over his head. He therefore labors cheerfully as a tool for his enemies.

The most gross misstatement about fascism presently understood, however, is that the Axis constituted a plot to take over the world. It is truly amazing that people believe this today, for there is no evidence for it whatsoever. However, most historians simply treat it as a given.

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Guess AIG’s problem was that they weren’t a quango — yet.

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Yeah, that Industrial Revolution is quite overrated.

Next: Reintroducing the Organic Corn Laws.

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Doesn’t appear to have been a Muslim, which is somewhat surprising.

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And there you have it.

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And yet leftist students do this habitually to “right-wing” flyers and newsletters published on campus that they disagree with, yet nothing ever happens to them.

Funny how that works.

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Yeah – what’s up with that?

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

They have the backing of President Obama, who promised on the campaign trail that collective bargaining and workplace protections “will be a priority” for his administration. “It is unacceptable for TSOs to work under unfair rules and without workplace protections — this makes it more difficult for them to perform their jobs,” Obama wrote in a letter to the American Federation of Government Employees in October. “Since 2001, TSA has had the unfettered ability to deny its workforce even the most basic labor rights and protections.”

Oh, they object to being treated the same way they treat airline passengers? Quelle domage.

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As of today, smokers will have to pay an additional tax 61 cents per pack of cigarettes, amounting to a 156 percent increase – and the very people President Obama promised to spare from higher taxes are bearing the brunt of the cost, since (as ATR has been pointing out on numerous occasions)

• 55 percent of smokers are “working poor”
• One in four smokers live below the poverty line
• On average, smokers, whose median income is a little more than $36,000, make about 30 percent less than non-smokers.

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Shores of Tripoli under Jefferson, yes; shores of Somalia under Obama, no.

Change you can believe in.

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Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their five children, aged from three to 11, will appeal to a court on Thursday in Tennessee, where they fled after attempts by German police three years ago to force the family to obey the country’s laws which make school attendance compulsory.

Huddled masses yearning to breathe free — good luck with that. And stay away from California.

Read it.

California has furloughed workers and slashed programs to close a $41 billion budget gap, but it still has more than 400 judges in Los Angeles County who each make more than the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

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

Read it.

Justice Department lawyers concluded in an unpublished opinion earlier this year that the historic D.C. voting rights bill pending in Congress is unconstitutional, according to sources briefed on the issue. But Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who supports the measure, ordered up a second opinion from other lawyers in his department and determined that the legislation would pass muster.

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

Of course, if the Bush administration had done something like this, both Congress and the media would be screaming “Politicization! Partizanship!” for the next ten years. But it’s the Obama Nation, so that’s all right then.

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“We’re from the government, and we’re here to help … ourselves.”

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The nanny state advances apace.

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

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

Read it.

I’m waiting for one to get in an accident and incinerate a city block when the hydrogen tank fails.

But of course a Segway is too dangerous to allow on the streets….

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Perhaps something like this will be the Obamateurs next project.

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This is a serious scam. Legacy Bank of Texas took my brother for over $400 this way. Be warned.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Only in New York.

“NYU is an experimental community,” said Joshua Lawrence Becker, 21, a junior. “I bet student morale will plummet now that (Narnia) is gone.”

I have no doubt.

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Well, they don’t have Democrats to deal with, as we do. Gives them an unfair advantage, it does.

Steve Sailer cuts to the chase.

As I’ve mentioned before, many a female pundit’s output consists in large part of demands that society’s structures and values be revolutionized so that she, personally, will be considered hotter-looking.

That certainly explains Maureen Dowd.

Sorry, Maureen, but your nemesis, Catherine Zeta-Jones, is brown-eyed, so you can’t actually blame society’s prejudice against brown eyes for you not snagging Michael Douglas.

Ouch.

Read it.

Seems pretty obvious to me. For alleged linguists, the guys at Language Log oft times show astonishing ignorance of real languages and their history.

How many people start sentences (really: sentence fragments) with a conjunction (and, but)? Where did they pick that up? Well, how about from the Bible? St Paul does it all the time — not surprising, since that’s a standard grammatical feature of Greek — and most translators of the Bible kept the same structure, for “authenticity” (Word of God and all that, you know).

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Consumers who are trying them say they sometimes fail to work, or wear out early. At best, people discover that using the bulbs requires learning a long list of dos and don’ts.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

A former U.N. official who oversaw reconstruction funds in Afghanistan diverted half a million dollars from roads, schools and clinics to fund his luxury lifestyle, according to a confidential internal U.N. investigation.

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

Read it.

A United States senator has introduced a bill that would bail out the nation’s newspaper industry, which has fallen on unprecedentedly hard times. It’s an idea that makes sense: given the symbiotic nature of the media and the current administration (and the permanent bureaucracy), nationalizing the newspapers is the perfect way to ensure that they do not lose their status as the monopoly mouthpiece for the leftist intelligentsia.

Read it.

Hint: One way or another, if the statists have their way, either by law or through taxation to support a National Health Service-type plan.

But some powerful Democrats have supported a mandate, including Hillary Clinton, Max Baucus (a key health-reform power broker in the Senate) and Tom Daschle (OK, maybe he’s not so powerful anymore).

The health insurance industry also backs a mandate. This is no surprise — the Health Blog would certainly back a mandate requiring all Americans to read health-related blogs. But we were reminded of the industry’s position again this morning, with the report that two health insurance trade groups wrote a letter to the Senate, offering to stop charging sick people more for coverage, provided that everyone is required to buy insurance.

Read it.

The PC witch hunt against “hate speech” apparently trumps any right to free speech. Canada has fallen far.

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Prediction: The only people who will try this will be lefty agitators like Ward Churchill and William Ayers who oughtn’t to be teaching anyway, and who will attempt to leverage the “radical street cred” thus gained to pressure faculties into granting tenure where it is otherwise not deserved.

Read it.

This would be amusing if it weren’t that it involved real people.

Welcome to the U.S.S.A.

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Or, at least, in the Real America that lives on the Left Coast.

Just as Apple ads reflect the Real America that lives in Cupertino.

Neither bears any resemblance to the Real America that lives in Dallas, Des Moines, Dulute, or Detroit.

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American policymakers used to take bold action like that. Now they just sit and whine and wring their hands.

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I don’t think this is a episode of the Three Stooges, but you can never be sure with the British police.

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At last a “progressive” admits that there objective is to reverse the industrial revolution.

Gee, in the old days they called that “conservative”, even “reactionary”. But now it’s “progressive”.

Times change — and apparently so do words.

Read it.

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

Of course, if NATO weren’t a bunch of useless wankers, this problem wouldn’t be a problem.

Read it.

What a revealing development.

A science teacher who secretly filmed shocking scenes of pupil misbehaviour for a Channel 4 documentary has been found guilty of unprofessional conduct.

I guess “being professional” means “not ratting out your colleagues about the dirt swept under the rug”. Well, I’ve always suspected that. No wonder it’s such a behavioral sink over there.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably anywhere that the NEA holds sway.

Martin Feldstein points out some inconvenient truths about alleged-smart-guy Obama’s plan to mutilate the charitable giving deduction.

In effect, the change would be a tax on the charities, reducing their receipts by a dollar for every dollar of extra revenue the government collects. It is hard to imagine a rationale for taxing schools, hospitals, medical research budgets and arts organizations in this way. I suspect that the administration officials who drafted this proposal did not understand that it would have this perverse effect.

Well, it’s not as if anybody in the Obama Nation has demonstrated any understanding of how money and the tax system actually work. For people with a lot of advanced degrees from spiffy upper-class institutions, these guys don’t give any appearance of being the sharpest knives in the drawer.

Read it.

“Travellers” are what the Brits call gypsies and other itinerant riff-raff, very roughly equivalent to the American concept “white trash”.

An elderly couple who complained in a survey about mess left behind by travellers’ groups have been told their comments will be ignored because they were deemed to be racist.

Although “travellers”, like “Muslims”, aren’t a race — but that really doesn’t matter, these days; “racism” is merely a convenient term to use for “not liking a politically fashionable fringe group”.