Read it. For some reason, people are always surprised when a Communist country acts like, you know, a Communist country.

Read it. Cool — Pakistan is just Watts in Urdu. No wonder they can’t get anything done.

Read it. Hey, it’s not easy finding the right kind of lipstick for a pig.

Read it. Looks like Tom Cruise from here.

Read it. Surprising to see such a pro-freedom piece in the Washington Post. Enjoy it while you can.

Read it. A perennial problem in these “countries” that are soldered together by some megalomaniac’s ambitious fantasy.

The official point of view is that there is one Pakistani nation united by the bonds of Islam and the national language, Urdu.

Urdu being a variant of Hindi that is chiefly distinguished by being written in Arabic letters, and has about as many native speakers in Pakistan as there are native speakers of Spanish in the U.S.

In this case the culprit was Jinnah, but India suffered from Mohandas Gandhi’s fantasies even more; by rights, it ought to be about 12 different states, and I suspect would be a happier (and less troublesome) place.

Who killed Benazir Bhutto? It’s like a board game.

Between this and the Iowa caucuses, don’t expect to find any real news in the “news media” for about a week.

Read it. We can only hope.

“He tends to think like a gangster,” said Jim Thomas, a former senior defense planner who worked with Vickers. “He can understand trends then change the rules of the game so they are advantageous for your side.”

At last, someone with a clue.

Read it. We’re screwed, basically.

Read it. Perhaps Michigan will stop before it goes over the cliff.

Read it. I guess enforcement works.

Read it. Don’t remember being abducted by aliens? Well, then, you must have repressed it.

The researchers then offered a $1,000 reward—posted in three languages on more than 30 Internet websites and discussion groups—to the first person to identify a case of dissociative amnesia in any work of fiction or nonfiction prior to 1800. They received more than 100 responses, but none met the “repressed memory” criteria. Although many early texts describe ordinary forgetfulness caused by natural biological processes, as well as instances of individuals forgetting happy memories and even their own identities, there were no accounts of an inability to recall a traumatic experience at one point and the subsequent recovery of that memory.

In other words, it’s pseudo-scientific bullshit. And yet there are people in jail even as we speak because of it.

Read it. And Pat Buchanan is loving it.

Read it. Richard Cohen is perhaps a stereotypical Brahmin “journalist” — good at feeling your pain and that of the other “little guys” out there, but not good for much else; certainly not good at drawing the obvious conclusion, that the corruption of D.C. and other large behavioral-sink cities is a direct outgrowth of their being controlled by the modern Democratic Party, whose approach to politics differs from that of the late Soviet Union in no discernable particular.

Read it. Imagine what American politics would be like if we had tribes.

Imagine what Iraqi politics would be like if they didn’t.

That’s basically the difference between the First World and the Third World.

Read it. Then go look up “pander” in the dictionary. Also “dissimulation”, “hypocrisy”, and “meretricious”. Take whatever action you think is appropriate.

Read it. That’s so John Edwards can sue somebody when it all goes wrong. Note the picture. These guys are all in it together.

George Will points out that Congress is possibly the most worthless institution in the country.

Read it. Hint: It’s probably not you.

Thus in a generous accounting the rich get 26% of the benefits of federal spending and pay 68.7% of the costs.  In percentage terms the rich get about 37 cents on the dollar.

Read it. Let me get this straight: Our teacher-education system is crappy, so the answer is to pay people to go through more of it? I don’t see how this solves the problem.

“What we’re really trying to do is to dignify the teaching profession and give it status,” Levine said.

Which is, please note, a different thing than getting people involved in the profession who will dignify teaching and give it status. This is, in short, just putting lipstick on the pig.

The performance of high school students taught by the fellows will be tracked to gauge whether the program makes a difference.

And you can believe as much or as little of that as you care to. Prediction: Either the tracking will show that it doesn’t, in fact, help, but more money will be thrown at it anyway on the grounds that the fact that it doesn’t work proves that it’s underfunded; OR they’ll massage the numbers to show that it does work even though it doesn’t.

“It clearly calls attention to teaching as a profession in a way that accords it some prestige,” Pianta said. “What this gives us is another way to attract the best and brightest.”

Let’s face it, “the best and the brightest” don’t want to work in “high-needs schools”; no amount of money is worth your life.

Oh, and good luck trying to persuade people who are barely literate and numerate, and whose goal in life is to be the next bling-bedecked rapper, to study math and science. Yeah, that’s really going to work.

Read it. The problem with that is, that most people who read the Washington Post on a regular basis think that any person who wants to own a firearm is ipso facto mentally ill, so it’s difficult to see in what way this isn’t just another end-run around the Second Amendment.

Read it. I guess we’d better watch out.

Read it. Devolution — with a vengeance.

Read it. A proper gentleman is shaved by his valet, of course, not by some grubby tradesman.

Read it. And this discussion is happening on the pages of the Washington Post.

I wonder what it’s like to live in a country where law enforcement and intelligence agencies actually have a clue?

And your tax dollars are paying for all this. Enjoy.

Read it.

Read it.

Thomas Sowell hears the sounds of chickens coming home to roost.

Read it. It has bipartisan support, so of course it will go nowhere, because it doesn’t favor an identifiable interest enough to build a constituency to ensure funding. (Except the common good, of course, but you see how few are interested in that.)

Read it. And place your bets.

Read it. And about time, too — crime in South Africa is worse than in D.C., and that’s saying something.

The WaPo is, of course, shocked. Police attempt to thwart crime? The very idea.

Read it.

But then the entire question of financial aid at Harvard (and Yale) is a farce: it would cost only $238 million—about 1 percent of an endowment that gained $5 billion in fiscal 2007—to pay tuition, room, and board for all Yale College students this year. Financial aid is about increasing the size of the applicant pool so you can turn more of them down, and win the prestige that comes with enhanced selectivity.

So you establish rules that say that you value diversity, then set the price so high that admission is controlled by the financial aid decision rather than the formal offer to admit. That way you can ignore diversity behind closed doors while piously praising it in public. Very clever, these People of the Crust.

Read it. I’ve got to say that Tom Cruise looks pretty sharp in that Wehrmacht uniform.

Read it. I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it. No wonder people hate cellphone companies.

Read it. Because most of us spend our days with turkeys? That’s just a guess.

Read it. That sound you hear is a bunch of Democrat heads exploding.

Read it. Of course, if you write for the Washington Post, this is the very definition of news.

Read it. Dictatorship appears to be on the march again in South America.

Read it. That’s because colleges, with typical Brahmin arrogance, are ignoring donor intent.

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

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

It’s also an excellent example of how even a sect that attempts to preserve the outward forms of Christian worship eventually wanders all over the map and comes apart once it is severed from the living tradition of the Church. Sad, but there it is.

Read it.

 What’s amazing in this case is how the White House has allowed intelligence analysts to drive policy.

And that says pretty much all that needs to be said about the Bush administration generally. One of these days we may actually get a Republic President (or even a Democrat one, although that’s hardly likely) who understands that (a) the bureaucracy is not your friend and (b) they need to be stepped on, hard. I just hope I live to see it.

Read it. I’ve always been a sucker for artist’s renderings of vehicles that have no chance of seeing actual production.

I especially like this bit: “Road vehicles offer personal freedom and door-to-door travel; yet they cause unacceptable congestion and pollution.” Unacceptable to whom? Not unacceptable to the people who use them, or they wouldn’t use them. Unacceptable to the People of the Crust, perhaps. Unremarked here is that the congestion is the fault of governments who control the roads yet won’t expand them so as to eliminate congestion. Also unremarked is that breathing modern car exhaust is safer than breathing the air in places like Los Angeles fifty years ago; reducing congestion, for example, would decrease the amount of time cars spend traveling at inefficient low speeds on the highways, and nuclear power would reduce the amount of coal and oil burned for “clean” electric power. We have the technology to solve these problems, it’s just that the People of the Crust are too busy pursuing their political agenda to get with the program and use what we know to fix what we can fix.

Read it. Just stupid, I guess. I haven’t given a dime to Yale since I graduated, and I sleep well at nights. Of course, if they didn’t do their best to produce 6,000 new Communists every year, I might feel differently.

Read it. I was particularly struck by this passage: “We saw a great deal of interest in these donors providing their children with philanthropic budgets to give money on their own”.

Now, consider: By doing that, what are you training your children to do? Give their own money to those less fortunate? I suggest not. I suggest that they are training their children to underwrite their own momentary sentimentality with money that they did not earn but which came from someone else.

No wonder the children of the People of the Crust grow up to be such tax-and-spenders.

Read it. And who could blame them?

Read it. Well, when they quit being a computer company and turned into Best Buy without the refrigerators, the writing was on the wall.

Read it. The iron laws of economics makes socialized medicine a joke. Markets work even when you don’t want them to.

Read it. I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked. You’d think they were the New York Times.