Read it.

We have the technology.

Yaacov Ben Moshe wishes you a Merry Christmas, dammit.

Steven Brust, who is one of the outstanding fantasy writers of his generation but politically is a reincarnation of Eugene Debs (I guess fantasy is his life) has an entertaining rant that will sort of stand as an archetype for what all of the “Change We Can Believe In” crowd are probably feeling right now.

I won’t say “I told you so”, but I will enjoy a quiet snicker.

Read it.

Might as well, it’s probably obsolete anyway.

Those guys who took an analog phone into the box with them are in for a rude surprise if they ever wake up, though…

Read it.

“The way we envision it is, there would be a bunch of these sent out in a swarm,” said Greg Parker, who helps lead the research project at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton. “If we know there’s a possibility of bad guys in a certain building, how do we find out? We think this would fill that void.”

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Relatives are “outraged” and plan to sue the city, said John Lemieux, their lawyer.

Of course.

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You never know when one of these babies can save your life.

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Well, they could always change the sort of music they put out…. This just makes plain what a lot of us have been saying for years.

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The Bible is silent on exactly which day God created public transportation, probably sometime between when He created the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air and when He created Kraft Cheese Singles.

Interesting writing in the Washington Post. Whoda thunkit.

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American, of course. I’m impressed.

Of course.

Navy has won 13 straight times against Air Force and Army since 2002, outscoring the programs 441-205 during the streak. The Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy remains docked with Navy.

Quality tells.

Read it.

Read it.

White people love political prisoners because they are individuals who have been locked up because their beliefs or their presence stands in defiance of an unjust system. In fact, most white people would love to be locked up for their beliefs provided that they could go to a jail with private toilets, plenty of books and no rape.

Read it.

Read it.

Now you can buy insurance against the risk of being uninsurable.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Read it.

Would you buy an ad in a high school teacher’s test?

It is raining small furry animals outside, which means that all the nimrods who were camped out at Best Buy are miserable. I am inside a warm house, with food in the fridge, plenty of cold Pepsi, and no place I have to be for the next three days. I have the Internet and two huge stacks of books, one from the library and one from my wallet. My wife is asleep, which means that I don’t have to look at any cute pictures of cats.

It don’t get any better than this, as we say here in Texas.

Read it.

The grownups step in.

We wonder this morning if an Iowa foursome who tried to arrest Karl Rove back in July is wishing they’d had a tutorial on the topic. The four were cited for trespassing after attempting a citizen’s arrest of Rove at the Wakonda County Club in Des Moines, where he spoke at a Republican fundraiser. They were stopped at the country club’s entry gate. On Friday, a jury returned guilty verdict against all four.

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“Two mobile applications, NMobile and Trapster, are providing drivers with up-to-date maps of speed-enforcement zones with live police traps, speed cameras or red-light cameras. Each application pulls up a map pinpointing the locations of speed traps within driving distance and an audio alert will sound as vehicles approach an area tagged as harboring a speed trap.

Change We Can Believe In.

Read it.

In light of how far we’ve come from our Red State, non-White People roots, this ought to prove amusing, if not useful. Read it with a glass of pretentious Chardonnay and some overpriced Brie.

Read it.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Better pay that Social Security tax.

The Hog likes tools that serve more than one function.

One of the guns that caught my eye a year or two ago was the Thompson .45-caliber rifle. You can buy these with removable buttstocks, and you can add hundred-round drums. That’s not bad. It’s a short weapon with no recoil to speak of, and it will shoot a hundred marvelous .45 ACP rounds as quick as you can pull the trigger. Aiming becomes nearly optional. It’s heavy, and I’m not sure how reliable the drums are, and it will cost over a grand, but it seems like a surprisingly nice defensive weapon.

Read it.

“We fill the gaps,” explains the 39-year-old Mr. Prince, a former Navy Seal whose title is chairman and CEO of Blackwater. A graduate of Hillsdale College (his Michigan family previously owned the automobile-parts manufacturer Prince Corporation), he equates Blackwater’s emergence to FedEx, which “evolved due to the lack of capabilities and responsiveness of the USPS” [U.S. Postal Service].

The Hog continues to refuse to discuss politics.

It’s really unfortunate that women are allowed to vote. Whatever problems would arise from male-only suffrage, at least we would be safe from socialism and pacifism, and we would always be allowed to defend ourselves and our families.

Won’t even touch the stuff. God and gardening, that’s all he’s doing these days.

The Hog takes a look at some basic tools.

I’m thinking I may reserve the Gerber for pig-slicing. It looks ideal for the job. That saw on the back will make short work of the stubborn bits. If I sharpen the knife edge up, it should slice pork really well. And while I love my 14? Forschner scimitar knife, a machete sends a message a kitchen knife just can’t equal. It says, “Men are eating. Go back in the house until the police come.”

Read it.

If, indeed, you ever knew it in the first place.

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What’s not to like?

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What White Person hasn’t worried about protecting that all-important wine collection from the hazards of living on the Left Coast? Well, fret no more — WIRED is on the case.

Watch it.

Not only is this terrifically funny, but I’m fully prepared to believe that Tiger Woods can walk on water to hit a golf ball. He’s just that good.

Read it.

We have the technology, apparently.

Read it.

And, of course, no treatment of Dracula would be complete without reference to Fred Saberhagen’s re-interpretation (which actually makes more sense than Stoker’s).

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

I’d feel better about it if they weren’t so ugly. But that’s me.

Amazing how a simple desire to make money can create a product that, were it the result of a government program, would cost ten times as much, look ten times as ugly, and take ten times as long.

Read it.

We all have dreams.

(Mine is Ted Kennedy in a pine box, between Barney Frank and Chris Dodd similarly arrayed. But I don’t have Shamino’s money.)

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Some good news for a change.

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Sometimes you beat the bear….

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Some good news on the language front.

Read it.

Call me when they install the mind-control lasers.

Read it.

Some people just have no sense of humor.

Read it.

Note that it isn’t a huge publicly-funded university, but a smaller private college, that is leading the charge here.

Read it.

At first sight, the idea seems plausible. True, vertical farming would be a non-starter if urban rents were higher than rural rents. But we all know that land is just as cheap in downtown Manhattan as it is in rural Nebraska, right? One wonders, though, why farming moved off the island a more than a century ago.

Professor Despommier claims that food grown indoors would be pesticide-free, unlike that dirty outdoor produce. Once again, totally plausible. Big American cities are as free of rats and roaches as Ireland is of snakes. The Museum of Natural History has a glass case containing the last rat found in New York City, way back before World War I. (Just don’t look down at the tracks when you are waiting for a subway).

But then if we admit there are millions of rats and billions of roaches, then the crops growing in vertical farms would have to be protected by enough rat and roach poison to kill Xerxes’ army. Fortunately, in rat- and roach-free urban America, that is not a consideration. And even if it were, we would not need to worry that health inspectors would be bribed to overlook the rodent droppings and roach eggs in our tenth-story grown arugula. The civil servants in New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia are known worldwide for their incorruptibility.