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Reports that the textbook The World: Social Studies asserts that: “Christianity was started by a young Palestinian named Jesus.” have triggered considerable controversy. Some maintain that this is a gross inaccuracy reflecting the intrusion of anti-Semitism, to which others respond that it is correct and so unexceptionable. The former are correct: the description of Jesus as a Palestinian is both inaccurate and offensive.

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The rot spreads even to so hard-headed a country as Switzerland. There is no hope.

For years, Swiss scientists have blithely created genetically modified rice, corn and apples. But did they ever stop to consider just how humiliating such experiments may be to plants?

I am not making this up.

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How convenient.

Jerry Pournelle has a premonition of what National Health Care will be under the Democrats.

That was with Kaiser, which is an extraordinarily well run organization — at least in my experience — and staffed with some of the most pleasant and just plain nice people I’ve ever run into. Now imagine this experience when it has all be nationalized and there’s a big national health care system. I can hardly wait.

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Unfortunately, everybody seems to be caving. Boy, that will really discourage them, won’t it?

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Imagine employers scanning people’s brains to choose more or less risk averse depending on job needs.

Uh, no thanks. Imagine the potential for workplace violence.

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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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But the kids are alright.

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

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Good ol’ Unintended Consequences strike again.

This is such an absurd idea I’m surprised the Europeans didn’t think of it first.

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I have a question: Why did we have military ties with a COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP in the first place?

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Certainly there are enough Democrat blowhards in Illinois and Michigan to power the country for centuries.

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Hey, don’t laugh, this is serious business for the readers of the Washington Post.

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

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Will they take the hint? Probably not.

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Nowadays, an artist behind enemy lines is more likely to be drawing stuff for their side.

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

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How useful.

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They’ve destroyed their own country, they’re a bunch of genocidal maniacs, and it’s our fault.

Associated with an “aid agency” ought to be an indictable offense.

Megan McArdle explains it all to you.

Is by looking at another kind of crash:  exploding Space Shuttles.

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Well, I guess that makes it official. Pretend is just as good as reality.

I think I’ll run for something as Barack Obama. Hey, I can dress up like him.

(Oh, and you might want to avoid the state of Georgia until further notice.)

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What do you think is paying for AlGore’s Manhattan-sized carbon footprint?

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Pythons will be pythons….

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

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Boy, there’s a shocker.

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The Brownshirts and Blueshirts reborn. Thank God you don’t live in Europe.

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The U.S. government has been sending fewer Iraqi immigrants to Michigan because of its struggling economy, though some expect refugees to make their way here anyway, costing the cash-strapped state more in the long run.

Gee, you mean immigrants come here and promptly go on welfare? My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Michigan is one of the nation’s top destinations for Iraqi refugees, having received about 3,000 of the 13,823 Iraqi refugees allowed into the country between Oct. 1, 2007, and Sept. 30, based on State Department figures obtained by the Associated Press.

That might have something to do with the fact that the Detroit area has the largest concentration of Muslims on North American continent. Times being what they are, you can’t impose shari’a law without a sufficient number of sandals on the ground.

Michigan has had the nation’s highest average annual jobless rate since 2006. The seasonally adjusted August jobless rate of 8.9 percent was the highest in the state since late 1992.

That’s what being run by Democrats will do for you, as I keep trying to get through to my brother and his leftoid wife.

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Works for me.

It is a mark of maturity on the behalf of Latinos as an immigrant ethnic group that they should want an extraneous layer of government to call their own and provide patronage jobs for the politically faithful.

It’s the American way.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

As a native Californian, something that I’ve noticed is an increasing intellectual disconnection between the power centers of the East and the reality on the ground in California. At bottom, this financial crisis is California’s fault. But Wall Street and Washington seemed to have no clue what California was like in this decade. Observe, for instance, all the incredulity when I’ve pointed out the role of Latinos in the housing fiasco.

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I lust for an iPhone, but I’m not willing to deal with Cingular/AT&T to get one. This post illustrates why. My wife and I briefly had mobile phone service with Cingular/AT&T, and it was unpleasant. (Quite unlike the “old” AT&T, which was fantastic until Cingular bought them and infected the whole organization with their craptacular attitudes.)

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Presumably the Georgians see themselves as the new mujahadeen.

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I’d be happy to criticize but I can’t say with a straight face that the CIA does any better.

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Health and safety officials say that the wording in police bravery awards should be changed to avoid encouraging officers to risk their lives.

“Unclear on the concept” seems totally inadequate, but I can’t think of any better.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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Most discussion of the mortgage crisis has been at the elite level — where it impacts banks, Wall Street investment houses, interest rates, liquidity. But on the street level, there are other, less obvious, consequences. Animals are abandoned as owners decamp; untended swimming pools breed mosquitoes. Abandoned dwellings in far suburbs don’t attract vagrants but they do get used by human smugglers as drop houses, since there are few neighbors to notice. Owners stop paying their HOA dues and maintenance is neglected, even as the dues escalate for those who stay behind. And much of the time there is no-one to do the work, due to the disappearance of the Latino labor-force.

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

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One of the hottest Internet videos during the mortgage and banking crisis has been a YouTube clip titled “Burning Down the House,” which outlines the untold story of how liberal Democrats pressured banks and lenders to throw standards out the window and give money to people who couldn’t pay it back.

Try watching it now, however, and you won’t be able to, thanks to the growing problem of “flag spam,” the practice of abusing online filter systems to squelch political speech with which one disagrees.

They’ve already hijacked Digg and Reddit. Who’s next?

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China has missiles. China has nuclear weapons. China is run by Communists. If that doesn’t scare you, you are an idiot.

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Income inequality in the United States consists of two gaps. The first gap is an upper-lower gap, between those with a college education and those without. The second is an upper-upper gap, between those with high incomes and those with extraordinarily high incomes.

As best-selling writer and investor Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out in The Black Swan, safe occupations are those where the worker is paid a fixed amount per unit of time. An accountant or a nurse is not going to become extremely rich or extremely poor; they could be called “billers,” because they bill for their time. On the other hand, a professional singer or a software entrepreneur is playing in a winners-take-most tournament. The difference in talent between an international pop star and an unknown lounge singer may actually be quite small. However, the nature of these fields is that the difference in rewards can be enormous. People who choose these sorts of occupations could be called “players.”

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Well, duh. There’s that old democracy thing rearing its ugly head again.

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If you’re looking for racism in American politics, look no further.

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In a political year unlike any in Alaska’s short history, Stevens’s extraordinary resilience might prove as reliable as his indictment was upsetting. The man who first went to Washington in 1956 to lobby for statehood has, as the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, shipped home the highest number of federal dollars per capita in the nation, nurturing along the way a paternalism that earned him the nickname “Uncle Ted.”

And that, in a nutshell, illustrates why our current political system is structurally dysfunctional. The way to succeed in Washington is to get re-elected. The way to get re-elected is to bring home enough pork that the constituency thus established is sufficient to do so. That’s all it is. So long as legislators can buy votes with taxpayers’ money, the system will continue to reward that sort of corrupt dealing. The best way to win a game is to cheat, and our political system rewards, rather than punishing, cheating.

Darwin Award nominee.

Not your father’s Great Britain.

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The French play for keeps.

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Can plastic “corks” be far behind?