Read it.

I’m shocked, shocked I tell you.

President Robert Mugabe’s government will defy an international court ruling that its seizures of white-owned farms were illegal, it said on Monday.

Boy, that international court is really a useful thing, isn’t it?

The Hog has an interesting experience with the government Home Depot.

Read the whole thing; it’s short.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Apparently activists are suing people for giving in to the activists’ previous demands.

That’s the world we live in.

Read it.

Keep an eye on Britain. They’re a couple of miles further down the road that we’re all on.

Read it.

Hint: No.

Leef points out that a lot of higher education is in pursuit of a credential. Why would a company want to hire someone with a credential when there are more efficient means of testing aptitude? Leef cites economist Lowell Gallaway’s argument about the effect of the Supreme Court’s 1971 Griggs v. Duke Power Company decision, which held that employers can be liable for violating federal equal employment law if they use general aptitude testing that has a “disparate impact” on minority job seekers. This, say Gallaway and Leef, has caused many employers to abandon such tests in favor of using educational credentials. On its face, the Griggs decision seems to argue against credentialism. But read Gallaway’s subtle reasoning to see why the unintended consequence is more credentialism.

And bear in mind that, the way education sucks these days, an employer has to require a 4-year degree to be reasonably sure of getting an employee who has what his parents would consider a high-school education.

Read it.

Trailing too closely behind trucks taking broiler chickens from factory farms to the slaughterhouse could expose motorists to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, say researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Oh, No, Mr Bill….

Read it.

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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The Rev. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, a revolutionary Nicaraguan priest, sounded like the old-school, 1980s-style Latin American leftist he is when he began his presidency of the 192-member U.N. General Assembly in September.

I give up — what business does a “revolutionary Nicaraguan priest” have being President of the U.N. General Assembly? And what benefit has any “revolutionary Nicaraguan priest” ever brought to Nicaragua, much less the rest of the world? Truly, this is Fantasy Land. And your taxes are paying for it! Aren’t you proud?

Read it.

I don’t doubt that many people shop at Wal-mart in order to save money, but I seriously doubt that this insane mob of people consisted mostly of suburban mothers looking for jumbo-sized diaper packs. No, these were people looking for slashed prices on electronics, outdoor gear, and clothing. These were bargain shoppers, for sure, but no one who stepped on Damour’s chest was there because they had run out of bread and heating oil.

One of the great blind spots that “caring people” have is the inability to appreciate that there are people in the world who just don’t care. Appreciating that historically demonstrable fact is the true basis of wisdom.

Amity Schlaes gives Krugman some noogies.

Here’s the meat:

Mr. Krugman is a new Nobel Laureate, teaches at Princeton University and writes a column for a nationally prominent newspaper. So what he says is believed to be objective by many people, even when it isn’t. But the larger reason we should care about the 1930s employment record is that the cure Roosevelt offered, the New Deal, is on everyone else’s mind as well. In a recent “60 Minutes” interview, President-elect Barack Obama said, “keep in mind that 1932, 1933, the unemployment rate was 25%, inching up to 30%.”

The New Deal is Mr. Obama’s context for the giant infrastructure plan his new team is developing. If he proposes FDR-style recovery programs, then it is useful to establish whether those original programs actually brought recovery. The answer is, they didn’t. New Deal spending provided jobs but did not get the country back to where it was before.

And here’s the moral: Even somebody who has impeccable Establishment credentials can be demonstrably wrong in pursuit of a political agenda. This is why it’s important not to just believe somebody because they have a lot of tickets punched, but to make them show you the numbers, and be able to explain them in terms a non-specialist can understand. “Trust me, I’m an expert” is the worst of all bases for public policy.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

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Germany reverts to the Middle Ages.

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One of the primary functions of a government is to ensure that people can go about their daily business in peace. It would appear that Mexico does not, effectively, have a government.

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And what does this tell us about rap music and the “culture” that spawned it?

Go on, take a guess.

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Domestic producers of the renewable fuel have been selling huge quantities of biodiesel in Europe and in other foreign markets, where prices are often better, and then receiving a $1-per-gallon tax credit from Uncle Sam.

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

Read it.

Colleges and college towns have become bastions of intolerance and enforced conformity. Political correctness? That’s not the tenth of it. I’m talking about the stifling of speech, dissent, or any deviation from orthodoxy. Colleges have gone from citadels of intellectual openness to dungeons of intellectual coercion. And in support of what? High ideals such as the canons of Western thought (freedom, liberty, justice, sovereignty of the individual, the inviolability of property rights)? More often, it’s the undermining of the same.

If this is news to you, you haven’t been paying attention, and you certainly haven’t experienced being flunked for your views (not your scholarship), having your perfectly reasonable points of view confiscated and trashed and/or burned (if they appeared in print), being shouted down, prevented from gaining a hearing, or having your audiences intimidated and threatened, your tenure denied, your application rejected, or your grant stripped.

The Gothic Gulag is alive and well in blue America.

Steve Sailer is quoting someone else but is still to be commended for bringing it to a wider audience, which it richly deserves. (NAM means “Non-Asian Minority”)

Every single one of these has the same form:

1) NAM group behaves badly
2) Media reports it as nonspecific problem of “society” and refuses to mention specific culpability
3) The government increases its power and forces non-NAMs to pay for their bad behavior
4) Refusal to address root causes increased rates of taxation, crime, victimization. Everything from airport security strip searches of grandma to gun seizures from law abiding citizens to forced busing into Rwanda-like schools is a function of this systematic attribution error.

This movie ends badly.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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So, say you’ve had a good relationship with a credit card company and been paying off substantially more than minimum payment over recent months. You’ve also completely paid off other credit cards in recent months. You then get a notice from the credit card company saying they’re reducing your credit limit, right before Christmas. Would you be more than a little miffed?

Read it.

Good. Perhaps the Left Coast and New Englad will go join Canada where they belong.

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

Read it.

The trouble is, almost everything we’ve been taught about the first Thanksgiving in 1621 is a myth. The holiday has two distinct histories – the actual one and a romanticized portrayal.

Very true.

No one is certain whether the Wampanoag and the colonists regularly sat together and shared their food, or if the three-day “thanksgiving” feast Mr. Winslow recorded for posterity was a one-time event.

Not even close. What the Pigrims were doing is the Martinmas feast, traditional in England from time out of mind.

From the late 4th century CE to the late Middle Ages, much of Western Europe, including Great Britain, engaged in a period of fasting beginning on the day after St. Martin’s Day, November 11. This fast period lasted 40 days, and was, therefore, called “Quadragesima Sancti Martini”, which means in Latin “the forty days of St. Martin.” At St. Martin’s eve, people ate and drank very heartily for a last time before they started to fast. This fasting time was later called “Advent” by the Church. #

Orthodox Christians still observe this pre-Nativity fast. The Pilgrims couldn’t refer to a “papist” Saint’s day, of course, so they “repurposed” it as a harvest festival … but it was the traditional Martinmas feast.

“But wait”, you say, “November 11 is not even close to the last Thursday in November.” Not now, but it used to be — in 1627 the Gregorian Calendar hadn’t yet come to England, and the Julian calendar they used was 11 days ahead of the actual solar time. Let’s see: November 11 plus 11 days equals — November 22! Their November 11 would be our November 22. (Yeah, it’s not exact, but in this, as in so much else, I blame FDR.)

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

Read it.

Read it.

Okay, take your best guess: Which one is Peter, and which one Wendy?

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And they want to close Guantanamo….

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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What sort of peckerwood has nude photos of his wife on his cellphone? I think this is God’s way of telling him to grow up.

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Not the sort of news you would expect to find concerning the Outer Hebrides.

Read it.

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

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

But nobody is talking about the obvious: Will the public works jobs be restricted to American citizens? To American citizens plus legal residents? Or will they just suck in more millions from south of the border as the Housing Bubble did, who will send tens of billions back home, depriving America of Larry’s promised Multiplier Effect?

The real economic collapse is happening in the four sand states, California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida. Sending billions to them for infrastructure projects would mean a large fraction of the public works payroll would go to illegal and legal aliens.

The one sure way to keep the unemployment rate in California (now 8.2%) from growing so fast is to have illegal immigrants go home. It’s a lot cheaper for all concerned if ex-construction workers are unemployed in Mexico or Guatemala than if they are unemployed in California. But nobody is mentioning that.

Read it.

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

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Read it.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

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Sam O’Shea told his mother Angela that he wanted to take the ‘green’ option and ride the two miles to St Paul’s Primary School, in Portsmouth, Hampshire.

However, staff told Sam and Mrs O’Shea that she would have to follow him to school and pick up his bike because there was nowhere to store it.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

Well, that’s what happens when the government tries to run your life — you let it do your work as well. People dumping their unwanted kids off in Nebraska is an illustration of the same situation.

Megan McArdle looks at the one-way left, who demand concessions for their side’s guy that they never gave (or will give) to the other side’s guy.

But beyond the tautological, what does this demand that conservatives recognize that Obama is their president mean?  Are they supposed to root for him to succeed?  One hopes that we are all hoping he will not run the country into the ground.  But since most conservatives believe that Obama’s agenda will, in fact, run the country into the ground, it would not be reasonable to demand that they actually hope he passes it.

Are conservatives supposed to suddenly like Obama? Or at least give him the benefit of the doubt? As far as I can tell, precisely none of the liberals urging this on conservatives obeyed their dicta when George Bush was supposed to be the object of their affections.

Megan McArdle puts on her economist’s hat and runs some numbers.

The real cost center is retiree health care, and as noted above, this is negotiated as part of the labor contract for the current workers.  Due, I’m told, to the UAW’s slightly strange constitution, retirees have more voting power than current workers.  That’s why GM’s medical costs rose at such a staggering rate; they were sacred to the real power in the union.

Read it.

We’ve pointed out plenty of times in the past, that any time there’s a database of info out there, the data is almost certain to be abused.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

It’s not the particular government program that’s of major interest, it’s the message the Bush Administration was sending. Federal regulators are supposed to take away the punchbowl when the party gets interesting, but announcing that the President hates down payments, that the Chief Executive feels that requiring people with bad credit to put money down on a house is UnAmerican and probably racist, at a homebuilder’s convention in Las Vegas, well, I’ve exhausted all the punchbowl similes … This is liking filling all the nasal decongestant inhalers at the Betty Ford Clinic with pure pharmaceutical cocaine.

Read it.

Senate Approves Plan Aimed at Protecting Savings From Global Crisis

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Yeah, they don’t want any threat to the liberal lock on the Civil Service, and they have judged (and who can say they’re wrong?) that he’s just enough of a pussy to roll over for them on that.

Read it.

I have an idea: Why not just leave them the hell alone?

Megan McArdle points out how the Indians are doing the job that Americans won’t do.

Read it.

If a fully loaded commercial airliner crashed every single day, killing all passengers and crewmembers on board, how long would it take for dramatic safety improvements to be mandated? Traffic experts say the equivalent is happening on our nation’s roads, with 42,000 people dying every year in automobile accidents, an average of 115 each day.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Most of the people I know who’ve been in car accidents were run into by (uninsured, often unlicensed) drunk illegal immigrants. Not a word about that in the story, of course.

Read it.

And so it starts.

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But he said a carrier fleet would only be used for defence, unlike that of “another country”.

And if you believe that one, he’ll tell you another one.