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Why travel to the Third World? Wait long enough, and it will come to you.

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Well, that’s New York for you.

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Actually, I heartily endorse having the military not recruit its lawyers from schools that don’t like the military attitude toward homosexuals. Now if we can just work a similar deal with Islamists….

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More than 100 geese have gone missing from an ancient castle sparking fears the birds are being stolen to eat.

Ya think?

A local bird protection group has appealed to the public to be on alert for any suspicious activities.

I would think so.

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Darwin Award nominee.

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Except, of course, that they’re not “marching for gay rights” — gays have exactly the same rights as everybody else — they’re marching for the right to be publicly and toleratedly gay, which is a different thing entirely.

Funny how “progressives” are all for democracy … until they aren’t.

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Sen. Webb is expected to travel on a tax-payer funded junket to Southeast Asia.  He  wants both his wife and his 18 month old child to accompany him without having to pay reimbursement to the government.  Unfortunately, according to a March 9, 2007, letter from Senators Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), while spouses are permitted to go with the Senator, “relatives of Senators (other than spouses) will not be permitted to travel with Senate delegations.”

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There was a remarkable exchange on the floor of the Senate this past Thursday between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. It offers pretty stunning evidence of how personally petty Reid is, as well as his penchant for defining “partisanship” as anything that keeps him from getting his way.

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In the late 1980s, before international experts arrived to tell us we had it all “wrong,” we in Uganda devised a practical campaign to prevent the spread of HIV. We recognized that population-wide AIDS epidemics in Africa were driven by people having sex with more than one regular partner. Therefore, we urged people to be faithful. Our campaign was called ABC (Abstain, or Be Faithful, or use Condoms), but our main message was: Stick to one partner. We promoted condoms only as a last resort.

Because we knew what to do in our country, we succeeded. The proportion of Ugandans infected with HIV plunged from 21 percent in 1991 to 6 percent in 2002. But international AIDS experts who came to Uganda said we were wrong to try to limit people’s sexual freedom. Worse, they had the financial power to force their casual-sex agendas upon us.

PEPFAR calls for Western experts to work as equal partners with African leaders on AIDS prevention. But as co-chair of Uganda’s National AIDS-Prevention Committee, I have seen this process sabotaged. Repeatedly, our 25-member prevention committee put faithfulness and abstinence into the National Strategic Plan that guides how PEPFAR money for our country will be spent. Repeatedly, foreign advisers erased our recommendations. When the document draft was published, fidelity and abstinence were missing.

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Well, perhaps the Church of England will become a family business — right when the customers seem to be leaving in droves.

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Well, that’s how the Anglicans got their start in the first place, after all, so they ought to be used to it.

That sputtering sound you hear is 1 billion Roman Catholics trying really really hard not to laugh.

It’s like watching a snowman melt in the sun.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

But the funny thing is, Bailyn’s long list of about a dozen or more things the Anti-Federalists warned would happen if the Constitution were ratified … they have all happened. They didn’t all happen right away. Many took until the Civil War, or the New Deal, or the Warren Court, or whatever. Still, when it comes to making long-run accurate predictions, the despised Anti-Federalists were right and the sainted Federalists were wrong.

Read it.

Boy, those South Africans 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.

Read it.

Mr Giscard d’Estaing told the Irish Times that Ireland’s referendum rejection would not kill the Treaty, despite a legal requirement of unanimity from all the EU’s 27 member states.

“We are evolving towards majority voting because if we stay with unanimity, we will do nothing,” he said.

Forget all of this democracy nonsense. We will decide what’s best for the people.

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There is an inverse side to all this dithering: the rush to resolve gargantuan problems that do not exist: global warming, institutional racism, “Islamophobia,” American military overreach, etc. Hanson is right. Action brings risks. Perhaps the hand-wringers figure that treating a non-problem involves no risk. If you multiply something by zero, after all, you end up with zero. So: by applying aggressive policies to challenges that don’t yet exist, they once again feel safely ineffectual. This is a mad type of preemption.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.