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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?

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In the name of fairness to minorities, community organizers occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes – and thereby force financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.

In other words, community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.

There you go.

THE seeds of today’s financial meltdown lie in the Community Reinvestment Act – a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.

Isn’t it amazing how many of our problems originated with Jimmy Carter?

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The narcissists on Facebook are going to learn the downside of having your life an open book very quickly, it would seem.

Pardon my grin.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

The family you sell it to will, no doubt, be moving to the exurbs to get their kids away from all the Guatelombians in the LA public schools. It’s not like Bush is going to close the borders and stop the flood of Guatelombians. So, there will always be refugees looking for “good schools.”

That’s one reason, you realize, why these new homes in the exurbs tend to be so big — they’re expensive in the hopes of discouraging low rent people from moving in next door. Sure, they cost a fortune to air condition during Lancaster’s summer (March-October), but it’s all in a good cause.

You start shopping around outside Lancaster. The Cypress Creek Estate sales agents talk about the new high school that’s going to be built to serve these new neighborhoods. It will be diverse, but not too diverse, if you know what I mean. Two-thirds white, one fifth Hispanic, enough Asians to show your neighborhood’s a good investment, enough blacks so that the football and basketball teams will be competitive. Sounds good!

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An excellent illustration of why I wouldn’t be happy working at Google, or Microsoft, or any company run by people whose idea of a good time is worrying about questions that have no significance.

The correct answer to most of these is “Who gives a shit?”

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Republican Newt Gingrich: “You have an administration which, in my judgment, has lost its mind.” And I agree wholeheartedly.

President Bush is so worried about his legacy – he is so afraid of being looked at as Herbert Hoover – that he is doing the very things that Hoover did: Intervene, intervene, intervene. He should do what Ronald Reagan did in 1981 and 1982 and 1987: Let the market play it out.

And that says all that really needs to be said on the subject.

Peter Hitchens is always worth reading — not always right, but always worth reading.

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Oh, yeah, G.E. is going to jump right on that one. Sure thing.

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On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

David Brooks makes an amazing discovery.

Christopher Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics: “The joyous reception from Congressional Democrats to Paulson’s latest massive bailout proposal smells an awful lot like yet another corporatist love fest between Washington’s one-party government and the Sell Side investment banks.”

If you wanted to devise a name for this approach, you might pick the phrase economist Arnold Kling has used: Progressive Corporatism. We’re not entering a phase in which government stands back and lets the chips fall. We’re not entering an era when the government pounds the powerful on behalf of the people. We’re entering an era of the educated establishment, in which government acts to create a stable — and often oligarchic — framework for capitalist endeavor.

The term “liberal fascism” comes immediately to mind.

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AFL-CIO, eat your heart out.

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Ah, but which half?

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How come nothing interesting like this ever happens in the U.S.?

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Didn’t know he could do that.

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

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… completing the destruction of the Parisian skyline.

My, that’s so ugly it’s yooguly.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Oh, they picked the wrong target this time. These guys have guns, and they won’t hesitate to use them.

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Well, that’s what happens when socialists raid the defense budget to fund goodies for the underclass and social engineers. Money’s got to come from somewhere, after all, and they can always depend on the stupid Americans to haul their asses out of the fire.

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Public schools lead the way in abandoning objective standards. There’s progress for you.

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It would seem so.

Except the Darwin Award winners, of course.

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Doesn’t Barack Obama come from Illinois…?

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However, a European directive issued earlier this year has, in effect, abolished more than 800 years of British history and allowed bakers to bake loaves of any size, bringing in some of the laissez-faire of the boulangerie – where bakers can create bread of any shape or size – across the Channel.

Jonathan Warburton, the fifth generation to head his family baking company, said: “This is a pretty historic moment. We’ve been baking since 1876 and ever since then our loaves have been 400g or 800g.

Britain sinks into Europe, apparently without a trace.

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I was wrong — Nixon was better.

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I can think of better excuses for killing Warren Beatty.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

What is the connection between Barack Obama, messiah, and William Ayers, convicted terrorist and English professor?

It’s a classic example of John O’Sullivan’s law that any non-profit organization that isn’t explicitly conservative always ends up being run for leftists ends.

That’s because foundations attract the sort of people who like spending other people’s money but for whatever reason can’t get elected to Congress.

Arch-Republican Walter Annenberg puts up a half billion bucks, $100,000,000 of which went to Chicago, to fix the public schools. For advice, he turns to two people at Brown, the leftiest of the Ivy Leagues. They direct his money to a proposal co-authored by unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, husband of Charles Manson fan Bernardine Dohrn. In turn, Barack Obama gets hired as chairman of the board of the organization dreamed up by Ayers to hand out money to leftist organizations in Chicago like ACORN. The $100 million of Annenberg’s money doesn’t do much for the test scores of Chicago public school students, but it does wonders for building Team Obama among his base, leftist activists and civil servants.

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Shallow left-wing materialistic narcissists are unsurprisingly bad for the environment.

Shucks, we knew that.

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I’m surprised they didn’t think of it first.

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Time for a government bailout? (Why not? Everyone else is getting one.)

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The rot spreads….

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As would I.

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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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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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Gareth Jones, 30, punched Deborah James so hard she left the Lloyds TSB function event on a stretcher and attached to an oxygen mask, and will be scarred for life.

You don’t mess with Marines. You just don’t.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Darwin Award nominee.