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The Irish have been heroes every age.

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Through all its difficulties, the military has kept its stride. That sense of balance comes partly from the fact that soldiers are anchored to the American bedrock. This includes the stereotypical small towns in the South and Midwest that have military service in their DNA. But it also counts plenty of hardworking, upwardly mobile Hispanic and African American families in urban America that produce some of the best soldiers I know.

One doesn’t often find good sense in the Washington Post so we need to treasure it when it happens.

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This is just funny.

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Wonder how much they’d charge for a simple pine box. Maybe you have to go to Target for that.

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A specter is haunting the Republican Party — the specter of John Galt. In Ayn Rand’s libertarian epic “Atlas Shrugged,” Galt, an inventor disgusted by creeping American collectivism, leads the country’s capitalists on a retributive strike. “We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it,” Galt lectures the “looters” and “moochers” who make up the populace. “We have no demands to present you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.”

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This Is Just Cool.

We don’t have life, so we can pass the savings on to you….

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I guess this is the next step beyond Susan Boyle….

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The pastime, which has a small but passionate following in the southern and western United States, is largely self-explanatory: using gunpowder to fire an anvil up to 200 feet in the air. It is also known as anvil launching and anvil firing.

The Hog isn’t doing politics any more. Nope. Not a bit.

Some dogs, you can kick every day. They’ll keep coming back and licking your hand. Others eventually bite. Obama has been kicking the press for over a year. Scratch that. He’s been having his servants kick the press, which is even more degrading. Nobody wants to be bitten by Renfield or shot by Gabby Hayes. It’s okay to be defeated by Luthor, but nobody wants to be pimp-slapped by Otis. Even the liberal press has been hammered. Will the Fox feud wake them up? When your entire profession is being threatened, sooner or later, you have to notice. If the Obamites can mistreat the biggest name in cable news, they can definitely beat on little tykes like Olbermann and David Gregory.

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That sounds about right.

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What’s it all mean, Mr Natural?

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“I was a fervent anti-capitalist at the time, but I came to realise during my four years in Benin that government and NGOs were having little or no impact. It was businesses that were really changing lives “delivering technologies like mobile phones, computers and the internet”.

Pandora unboxed.

The Pandora “music genome” project is one of the most intellectually exciting efforts (IMHO) going today.

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Alas, Rowley doesn’t appear to have taken out bear-inflicted damage insurance when she bought her iPhone, because her local Apple store allegedly refused to replace the damaged device for free, according to a report by website CIO.

For all your caped crusader needs.

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We have the technology.

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Consisting of a bacon cheeseburger with a buttered, grilled and glazed doughnut standing in for a bun, the Craz-E Burger puts such fatty delights as the deep-fried Mars bar in the shade.

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Last night, for those of you who were on another planet, Favre (days before turning 40) led the arch-rival Vikings to a win over Packers, the team, of course, that cut him loose, sent him packing, told him he was too old, etc., etc.

Ordinarily we don’t do sports here, but this seemed like an appropriate exception.

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The boy grabbed his junior-sized .410-gauge shotgun and fired at the creature which was 20 times his size and is one of the biggest ever seen in Texas.

He learned to shoot guns at the age of four and also knows how to drive all-terrain vehicles.

Well, Texans are like that.

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This is huge.

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Stanford University was one of the first academic institutions to come out with an iPhone app last October. Now Stanford has debuted an upgrade, dubbed iStanford, which lets students search for courses, add or drop them and see their grades.

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This is from 2004, but I’m going to put it here, because I wasn’t aware of it, and since I try to be aware of stuff involving my favorite authors, I assume that others might not be aware of it, either — and Neal Stephenson is someone of whom you ought to be aware. He is, as we say, always worth reading.

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And about time, too.

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We have the technology. It’s just a matter of getting past the sclerotic establishment gatekeepers that’s holding things up.

This doesn’t just mean a different way of learning: The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy and the institution of tenure are all threatened.

Pass the popcorn.

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I am not making this up.

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I’m impressed.

Suitable for framing.

The Other McCain is having fun.

By the way, this is probably a good time to express my appreciation to those readers — including generous folks in Albuquerque, N.M., Jacksonville, Fla., Depauville, N.Y., and Tequesta, Fla. — who have recently done their share to help me push the frontiers of rhetorical brutality against idiot liberals and RINO sellouts.

Dvorak has a dream.

Having heard Bill Gates promote the tablet machines to no avail, and watched the birth of the Kindle, Steve Jobs has developed a clear vision of what a perfect tablet should be, I’m sure. And no matter what it will cost to build, Apple’s offering will go beyond what anyone expected, just so Steve can show up all those who tried before.

Speed the day.

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It’s twue, it’s twue.

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Evidently Ecotopia hasn’t completely gone over the edge.

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After one of the primeval-scum robbers started pistol-whipping an employee of proprietor Charles Augusto, Jr., Mr. Augusto “rose from a chair 20 to 30 feet away and took out a loaded Winchester 12-gauge pump-action shotgun .. . and fired three blasts in rapid succession,” according to the New York Times.  Mr. Augusto had bought the rifle after being robbed 30 years ago.  “The first shot took down the gunman at the front,” who died almost immediately; the second two shots hit all three accomplices, who stumbled bleeding out of the store.  One died after having been taken to a local hospital (at whose expense?); the other two were picked up on the basis of their blood trail and witness descriptions and also treated at the hospital.

Read it.

Watch it.

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A “top ten” list to take with you on the road. Some cornerstones of American culture.

Iowahawk. ’nuff said.

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Steve Sailer piles on that toddlin’ town.

Patrick Fitzgerald has a fun job. The chief federal prosecutor in Chicago enjoys a “target-rich environment.” Besides nailing two Illinois governors, Tony Rezko, Conrad Black (and even Scooter Libby on a sojourn in D.C.), there are the colorful local characters.

Most towns – and states – run by Democrats provide a similar source of amusement.

The Obama family knows all about waste in the health care industry. Back when Mr. Obama was merely the chairman of the Illinois Senate Health and Human Services committee, Mrs. Obama got paid $122,000 annually as the University of Chicago Hospitals community outrage coordinator. When he got promoted to U.S. Senator, she got a $195,000 raise. When she quit, her job turned out to so incredibly important that the position she filled was eliminated.

Nope, nothing suspicious about that at all.

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It was delightfully appropriate that, as large parts of Argentina were swept by severe blizzards last week, on a scale never experienced before, the city of Nashville, Tennessee, should have enjoyed the coolest July 21 in its history, breaking a record established in 1877. Appropriate, because Nashville is the home of Al Gore, the man who for 20 years has been predicting that we should all by now be in the grip of runaway global warming.

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Mr Muller, who only sells American vehicles, is offering a gift certificate – only to be used at a licensed dealer – for a Kalashnikov AK-47 worth $450 (£320).

The guns are made by IO Inc in North Carolina, the only company in the US which manufactures the robust, durable weapon. First developed in the Soviet Union and exported to Moscow’s allies across the world, the AK-47 has been used in countless conflicts in the developing world. In the hands of the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, it became a symbol of resistance to America.

Asked why an automatic weapon with a 30 or 60-round magazine was required for self-defence, he cited the case of the Florida couple recently shot dead in their homes by a gang of six robbers.

Best Tombstone Ever.

Check it out.

Muammar Gaddafi doing to Barack Obama what we’d all secretly like to do.

Oh, I’m sure it’s fauxtography, but I still had to laugh. It would make a superb poster.

Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

For serious UI geeks, one way to see an intelligent control interface is as a false affordance – like a knob that cannot be turned, or a chair that cannot be sat in. The worst kind of false affordance is an unreliable affordance – a knob that can be turned except when it can’t, a chair that’s a cozy place to sit except when it rams a hidden metal spike deep into your tender parts.

Like most hubristic UIs, Wolfram Alpha is operating with a completely fictitious user narrative. The raison d’etre of the natural-language interface, stated baldly, is to create a usable tool for stupid people who might be confused or intimidated by a tree of menus. The market of stupid people is indeed enormous. The market of stupid people who like to use data-visualization tools is, well, not. (And since the interface is not in fact easy but actually quite difficult, it achieves the coveted status of a non-solution to a non-problem.)

But for the actual developers, this compensation mechanism is far more effective. The actual developers (a) have enormous experience with the hubristic UI, (b) have enormous patience with its flaws, and (c) most important, know how it actually works. So their internal model can be, and typically is, orders of magnitude better than that of any naive user. So the product actually seems to work for them, and does. Unfortunately, it’s hard to make money by selling a product to yourself.

I love you, man.