Read it.

Well, duh.

“Donate sperm = Get sued for child support some time in the next twenty years, and you can never predict when”

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Powell, Hagel and lesser-known Obamacons harbor no animosity toward McCain. Nor do they show much affection for the rigidly liberal Obama. The Obamacon syndrome is based on hostility to Bush and his administration and on revulsion over today’s Republican Party. The danger for McCain is that desire for a therapeutic electoral bloodbath could get out of control.

Not that any of these guys have ever done anything distinctively “Republican”. So they ought to love John McCain, who is exactly the same kind of RINO.

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Guess politics trumps Christianity these days.

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Next time somebody says, “It wouldn’t kill you to lose some weight”, you’ll know what to say.

Let this be a lesson to us all.

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Well — that explains a lot.

“Everything good is bad for you.”

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When in the course of political events it becomes advantageous for a presidential candidate to dissolve a campaign promise, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that the candidate at least refrain from wrapping himself in the Declaration of Independence.

Not Barack Obama.

Change you can believe in.

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…the next president will appoint almost 3,000 political executives. Not only will these appointees dilute transparency between the top and bottom of government, but each must go through a brutish approval process that will vitiate the chain of command. The 60 pages of clearance forms have never been more complex or difficult to complete — one set has to be filled out using a typewriter. Hillary Clinton might have promised to be ready on Day One, but she would have been lucky if her appointees were in place by March of Year Two.

Read it.

A teacher has told how she watched in horror as a 75ft branch crushed a schoolboy to death as he sheltered from the rain.

Daniel Mullinger, 11, was hit on the head as the enormous branch broke away from a tree at the 17th Century Felbrigg Hall, a National Trust-owned property near Cromer, Norfolk. Three of his friends were seriously injured.

As a child I was always told not to stand under a tree during a rainstorm. Apparently they do things differently in Britain.

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Considering what his government is doing (A truce? With Hamas? What are they smoking?), perhaps he just decided to take a short cut.

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After all, so serious a situation demands a serious response, does it not?

Too bad the pity party has to put up with gate-crashers.

Anne Applebaum is almost as dyspeptic as John Derbyshire. I didn’t think it was possible.

In its wisdom, the American nation has devised a presidential election system that actively selects for egotistical megalomaniacs: You simply cannot enter the White House if you aren’t one.

Unfortunately, George W Bush is the counter-example who refutes that position; only a clueless paranoid would believe that Bush is a megalomaniac. (Granted, we’ve got a lot of clueless paranoids in this country, nevertheless the observation stands.) Actually, that’s one of his deepest character flaws — as President. If he weren’t such a soft-hearted guy, the country would be in much better shape.

Read it.

Not necessarily a bad thing.

Wish I had the time for it, myself. My father-in-law does, and raises some pretty tasty stuff. I’m looking forward to helping eat the corn and tomatoes.

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Illegal border crossers are being held for prosecution rather than immediately delivered back into Mexico to try again.

There’s a step in the right direction.

Read it.

A better discription of how political fashion is intruding itself into “higher education” would be difficult to find. They don’t even try to disguise it any more.

Needless to say, the Washington Post is cool with that.

Read it.

Here is the leftoid agenda — laid out by two members of the American Brahmin caste, fittingly academics — laid out in black and white. Despite it’s “progressive” rhetoric, it reveals the fundamentally static and reactionary nature of “liberal” politics in the modern age. Change is bad, therefore people need to be protected from change by their friends the Overclass. Note the focus on changing the middle class into the subjects of manipulation, as they have succeeded with their allies, the Underclass. These people won’t be happy until there are only two classes left in America, the Rulers and the Ruled.

Read it.

Lakoff blames “neoliberals” and their “Old Enlightenment” mentality for the Democratic Party’s weakness. They think they can win elections by citing facts and offering programs that serve voters’ interests. When they lose, they conclude that they need to move farther to the right, where the voters are.

This is all wrong, Lakoff explains. Neuroscience shows that pure facts are a myth and that self-interest is a conservative idea. In a “New Enlightenment,” progressives will exploit these discoveries. They’ll present frames instead of raw facts. They’ll train the public to think less about self-interest and more about serving others. It’s not the platform that needs to be changed. It’s the voters.

Will the oxymoron party take heed? Stay tuned.

As an exemplar of conservatism, Lakoff cites the CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer.

Obviously, Lakoff’s connection with reality is tenuous, at best.

Read it.

Like watching a snowman melt in the sun.

Megan McArdle points out certain inconvenient truths to the delusional in the Overclass.

Seizing US officials and trying them for war crimes will be perceived by most of the American public as an act of war. An Obama administration that became complicit in this would find itself wistfully hoping that they could, perhaps someday, get their approval ratings up to those enjoyed in the later Dubya years. There would be not inconsiderable pressure to invade Spain to get them back.

The result, therefore, seems almost certain to be some sort of horrific blow to the power of all these international institutions, which become fundamentally irrelevant if the United States does not participate.

Read it.

There appears to be an unofficial competition between Indian and China to see who can skew their demographic future the farthest.

History teaches us that “excess of males over females” = “war”. All we can do is hope they’re satisfied with fighting each other. I’m just really glad we don’t share a border with either of them; we’re having enough trouble with Mexicans.

Read it.

Those in the Overclass don’t even bother to make an effort any more.

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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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Adolf would be proud.

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Wrong question. The question ought to be, “Do electronic versions increase an author’s income?”

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You, too, can fake that outdoor experience.

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In the Old Days, we called it “not paying attention” and it got you whacked.

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“Progressives” have been unsuccessful at making poor people unpoor. They have been very successful, however, at more evenly distributing Underclass criminality.

While crime rates in large cities stayed flat, homicide rates in many midsize cities (with populations of between 500,000 and 1 million) began increasing, sometimes by as much as 20 percent a year.

Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former residents federal “Section8” rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro community.

Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section8 rentals. Where Janikowski saw a bunny rabbit, Betts saw a sideways horseshoe (“He has a better imagination,” she said). Otherwise, the match was near-perfect. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.

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No mention of whether polar bears found them annoying. Probably just as well.

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

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Now there’s a White People’s job if ever I saw one.

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Foreigners. They never disappoint.

Megan McArdle explains it all to you.

Read it.

Like watching a snowman melt in the sun.

The art of bespoke tailoring began on Savile Row

Savile Row tailors lose fight to preserve the term ‘bespoke’

Savile Row tailor Richard Anderson: bespoke must mean bespoke

Read it.

This post grows out of a conversation I had recently with someone who deals regularly with graduate students. I was relating an exchange I’d had with an interviewer, a PhD economist, who’d asked me about my MBA. “Well, while I was getting it, I thought I knew everything,” I told him. “Sadly, that turned out not to be the case.”

The interviewer laughed. “Everyone thinks they know everything when they’re in graduate school.” He paused. “You’re lucky you got over it. A lot of people never do.”

To judge from the number of people who think that their PhD makes them an expert in, well, everything, he’s absolutely right.

Remember that next time you think that someone with an advanced degree is thereby entitled to some special deference. If they know more than you, then can demonstrated it; if they can’t demonstrate it, then they don’t know more than you.

And that goes double for people who try to pretend to expertise outside of the field of their training.

Read it.

An economist looks at gas prices. Apparently, it’s mostly the government’s fault.

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 know what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

Read it.

Mexico has a justice system? Who knew?

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Basic political equation: Corruption = Democrat.

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Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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At every step of her career, race has been central to her own identification and upward mobility. Judging from the quality of thinking and writing exhibited in her Princeton thesis, Michelle would not likely have been admitted to Princeton (and later Harvard Law) had she been white. And of course affirmative action opened up jobs, first in a prestigious law firm and later as the vice president of community affairs at the University of Chicago medical center-earning $300,000 a year.

In other words, everything she’s gotten in life has been because of her skin color rather than any personal merit.

In that she is the perfect partner for her husband, who wouldn’t even have been considered for the Democratic nomination, much less the Presidency, were it not for his skin color.

Read it.

This is where affirmative action gets you.

Just think: Vote for Barack Obama, and we could have this kind of fun in America.

Read it.

The council said it wanted the cottages to be the same colour because they used to be part of a single building.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. In fact, if you belong to a Nazi Home Owner’s Association, it already has.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

My concern, since 2001, is that more gay men would be interested in getting married (i.e., in a theatrical ceremony) than in being married (i.e., sexual monogamy). We’re talking about some awfully flamboyant folks: Gay Pride parades could more honestly be renamed Gay Narcissism parades.

Tim Blair reveals the sordid truth about polar bears and journalists.

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 know what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

Read it.

And lots of people, through some sort of tragic congenital failure, actually enjoy gardening.

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Your life under Islam. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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Apparently any labs doing the tests need to get both state and federal certification and can only do tests based on a physician’s recommendation.

Because it’s California, of course, where it’s legal to buy and use a controlled substance like marijuana but illegal to take a peek at your own genetic makeup.

Statism is on the march on the Left Coast.

Read it.

Monica Davey reports that, since January, a grand jury in Sedgwick County has been meeting to investigate whether the clinic belonging to Dr. George Tiller (pictured), Women’s Health Care Services, has illegally performed second- and third-trimester abortions. Their deliberations are scheduled to end next month.

Democracy. What a concept.