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At length, I went to the middle-aged shop owner and asked where she’d hidden my favorite treats — this gift from the gods to those of us who want to pretend our cookies are merely crackers.

“We used to stock those,” she said, sweetly, “but we kept running out, so we’ve stopped.”

To the extent that the French enjoy a natural advantage, it is in their inefficiency: They are the world’s most efficient producers of structured indolence. They are the kept women of the global economy; their status depends, in part, on their practical uselessness.

Reinvent the British and you get a global finance center, edible food and better service. Reinvent the French and you may just get more Germans.

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Why? Bureaucratic obstructionism, of course.

“The scheme is well supported with the notable exception of the Environment Agency, which despite our attempts, has refused face-to-face discussions. As a charity we’ve already spent £3.5 million and four years on the project, overcoming endless bureaucratic hurdles.”

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Of course the guy looks like a card-carrying metrosexual.

Megan McArdle appears to be challenging Jonah Goldberg for the position of “finder of weird stuff”.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Steve Sailer takes a look at the Ivins anthrax case.

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That’s great. Hey, I have a work fear. Can I be excused from going in to work?

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That’s because the gang will whip your butt if you don’t do what you’re told, and parents these days won’t.

This isn’t rocket science….

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I suspect it’s because they didn’t want to get saddled with her care under their “everybody gets covered for free” health care plan — like the one that the Democrats are pushing for this country.

This is what happens when the goverment turns into a monopoly provider of basic services.

Welcome to the Candian Soviet Socialist Republic, comrade.

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Darwin Award nominee.

A mature student choked to death during an impromptu competition to see who could eat the most fairy cakes, an inquest has heard.

Guess he wasn’t all that mature.

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Not your grandfather’s Britain.

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Think of it as evolution in action.

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The TSA has thoroughly replaced the Post Office as the Platonic Ideal of government incompetence and sociopathy. At least the Gestapo were efficient.

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Only for rather loose definitions of “men”.

Retailers say men’s tights are not being sold as fetish garments, but as practical, comfortable and stylish everyday wear.

Of course.

And a few even claim that tights are the latest symbol of metrosexuality.

Now that I’m fully prepared to believe.

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I guess Iraq is safer.

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Are you listenin’, New York Times? Iraq is a damned sight safer than the Bronx.

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How long before India comes apart? It ought to be about twelve different countries.

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They ought to be hunted down like dogs. Like dogs!

Megan McArdle explains why it’s a pointless sham.

Any Pigovian Tax on energy is going to make those with lower incomes suffer the most, because those are the people who use the most energy relative to their incomes.  To the extent that we aim at making the tax distributively fair, we will make it ineffective, at which point we might as well just roll the thing into the income tax structure and forget about taxing energy.

As currently structured, then, the Obama plan seems unlikely to induce much change in relative prices, supply, or demand.  Mostly, what we’ll achieve is creating an expensive new administrative burden.  This will be a very expensive tax, in terms of the amount of administrative overhead and deadweight loss we endure for each dollar raised or ton of carbon kept out of the atmosphere.

Megan McArdle points out some of the dystopian aspects of modern society.

The internet has allowed the deviants to find each other, to construct a community with shared norms that tolerate, even celebrate, the pain of others.  And it cloaks them in sufficient anonymity to get by in the outside world.  If people knew what they had done, I doubt they’d survive two weeks–no one would sell them food, rent them shelter, or for that matter, permit them to merge into the exit lane.  But no one knows.

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Criminals who have allergies are out of luck, I guess.

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Darwin Award nominee.

Megan McArdle limns the self-serving hypocrisy of the anti-war movement.

The South posed no immediate military threat to the North; they wanted to leave the Union, not invade it. If you don’t think that, say, Saddam’s awful behavior posed a valid moral reason to invade*, then it’s hard to make an argument that we had a right to invade to end slavery. Even a prudential argument doesn’t work very well on this metric–we killed more confederates than Iraqis both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population, and the south was far more economically devastated by the war than Iraq will have been.

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“Planned Parenthood is a lying, racist organization,” said Alveda King, niece of civil rights icon Martin Luther King, adding that one of two abortions performed on her occurred at a Planned Parenthood clinic.

“Planned Parenthood says they provide health services to the black community,” said the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, founder of the Los Angeles-based Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny. “I ask, what is healthy about killing black children?”

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I’ve read uncountable fiction stories in which an alien race (typically either elves or elves with the serial numbers filed off) are incredibly long-lived but only infrequently have children, and the story invariably assumes that because of that children are very precious.

The recent demographic declines in civilized nations, along with the vocal Human Beings Suck and Cause All the World’s Problems movement, suggests a different scenario: The alien race is very long-lived and children are considered a nuisance to be avoided. Oh, wait, I guess they aren’t that alien after all….

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Symptom and cause, rolled up into one tidy package.

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Like watching a snowman melt in the sun.

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The steel, glass and wood addition, called The Hub, is used by villagers for meetings, lectures and concerts and also contains a kitchen and a vestry.

I guess the competition for what church could best hide the fact that it was supposed to be a church.

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Cistercians were always a bunch of slackers.

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The only principles in the Democrat party are tactical.

Yaacov ben Moshe is always worth reading.

Tyranny- It Always Quickens the Progressive Pulse

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Amazing how that works. Guess the Kumbaya juice has lost it’s magic power.

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Darwin Award.

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I guess that means “stay away from Antigua”.

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Of course. “I’m not defective. Your test is defective for being geared toward NORMAL PEOPLE.”

If someone were to shoot him, it would solve the whole problem.

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Well, I suppose I should be happy that Edwards got caught a la Clinton, but I’m not. People ought to behave themselves.

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Wonder whether they asked the gorilla whether it wanted to go back to Africa. Probably not.

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Good thing he wasn’t in Parliament. Then he could have blown up the economy trying to make biodiesel.

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Apparently the problem is that they were behaving too much like Americans.

I can see the difficulty.

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And that, I think, about sums it up.

I wonder if I could have some bumper-stickers made up with that phrase. I bet I could sell a lot of them.

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No doubt a “special needs Yeti” who requires protection from exploitation by an unfeeling populace. Oh, the horror.

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And the Luddite program to cancel the Industrial Revolution proceeds apace.

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Actual data! But, alas, no surprised.

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Guess she wasn’t all that bright.

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Ironically enough, he’s not even British – he’s a Pole.

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The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has announced it will take the Cornish Pasty Association’s (CPA) application for Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) to Brussels.

This is what America would become if we took the advice of people like AlGore, Barack Obama, and John Kerry to become more like Europe. They reason they say that (although they would never admit it), is because Europe has a layer of government twenty miles thick (and growing) on its back — and that’s the environment in which Overclass fascists like them thrive.

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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A woman could only look on helplessly as her husband and three children fell 1,500ft to their deaths in the Italian Alps.

Darwin Award.

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Good to know that Slate hasn’t completely sold out.

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Boy, that U.N. is really a useful organization, isn’t it?