LGF. Actually, any good news at all at any time is a problem for Democrats, because their power depends on the people needing them to stave off whatever the latest trumped-up disaster might be. (Of course, depending on Democrats to cope with a disaster leads you to New Orleans, where a Democrat mayor and a Democrat governor of a staunchly Democrat state watched and whined as everything came apart around their ears.)

LanguageLog. “Now, Bobby, say you’re sorry!” “Okay. I’m sorry that Tom is a butthead.”

Engadget. Sort of like mashups for hardware. Could be very cool, could be a monumental disaster.

Read it. That seems light, but then I don’t know all the circumstances.

LanguageLog. Vegetarianism in New Zealand! Can it get any more exciting than that?

LanguageLog. Them’s fightin’ words in these parts, pardner.

Techdirt. Mike Masnick is almost as much of a grump as I am. I like that.

NYT. Hey, if my research grant money depended on it, I guarantee you that I could find over 500 reasons for mating.

NYT. Would she have gotten interviewed by the New York Times if she were a “global warming denier”? you be the judge.

This is why you need to subscribe to the online edition of the Wall Street Journal. Highlights:

New York Senator Chuck Schumer tells the New York Times that he’ll oppose this unless the tax increase also applies to real estate and other partnerships that also now pay the 15% carried interest tax rate. To put it another way, Mr. Schumer is saying he’ll only support the higher tax rate if it applies to more people. Meanwhile, by playing this “good cop” role, Mr. Schumer is raising millions of dollars in campaign contributions from hedge funds and private equity for Democratic Senate candidates running in 2008. Brilliant.

An excellent illustration of why the scorpion stung the turtle.

Deny the domestic manufacturing deduction to oil producers. This is part of the Senate Finance Committee’s energy bill and is estimated to raise $11.4 billion over 10 years. How this will increase domestic oil production amid $77 a barrel oil and widespread clamor for “energy independence” is one of those mysteries that Congress prefers not to explain.

Perhaps because there’s no sane explanation.

NYT. At last, scientists are including social organization in their understanding of evolution.

NYT. Well, I have to confess that the diet of Adélie Penguins in Antarctica is certainly one of my top priorities.

NYT. Not to mention all those people breathing out there. I mean, what’s up with that? Have they no concern for the environment?

WSJ. Not your usual self-help book. People like Dante and Petrarch started the European Renaissance, that turning point in history that has been the root of all progress in the modern world. Would that more people appreciated that.

LGF.

Read it. The inherent flaw in top-down design.

WP. Turns out that Congress is to blame for all these scumbags skipping out on their taxes. Whoda thunkit?

I guess even socialists get the blues. They’re against capital, and their against gains, so capital gains drive them right up the wall. And they don’t even get a cut of the money they had no hand in making! How immoral!

WSJ. Voter fraud — an inside look. And oddly enough, this ties in with my earlier remarks about voting machines.

Engadget. Guess this is turning out to be “Science Monday”. But this is really great stuff.

Engadget. Once again, the Japanese are ahead of the curve.

Engadget. How soon before our car windshields will be just flexible displays?

Techdirt. I had always wondered about that. The RIAA doesn’t sound like such a bargain for the artists, however much it may benefit the labels.

Engadget. This is pretty cool.

NYT. See? It’s all about the money. “Principle” is only for the dimwitted who read the press handouts and watch the well-named Boob Tube.

NYT. The subtext is all about “How DARE the ARMY approach OUR underclass?! Don’t they realize that these people ought to be manning the barricades here at home, not driving around freeing people overseas?!”

Unfortunately for the Brahmin caste, many of the underclass are determined not to stay there. They rightly see the military as an environment where they can get paid a decent wage for work that needs doing, from which they can get a leg up into the middle class. This doesn’t sit well with the People of the Crust, of course, whose power depends upon an uneducated proletariat steeped in Identity Politics whose votes can be bought with taxpayer money.

No link — the bare fact is enough to generate a collective sigh of relief from the middle class. The People of the Crust are in mourning, of course, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I had a girlfriend in college who enjoyed Bergman films and claimed to understand them. Thirty years later she’s a distinguished professor of law and I’m happily married to someone else, which shows you that life works out for the best more often than you might suspect.

FuturePundit. And that surprises me. Of course, one person’s slacker is another’s “poor baby”, so this may or may not be significant.

NYT. The Nanny State at work: Nobody wants to risk selling something new unless the bureaucracy has approved it.

Engadget. I’ve been hearing ads on the radio for attachments you can use with your washing machine to wash clothes without detergent. This would appear to be the next step.

WT. Sometimes the old ways are best.

UR. One of the most entertaining analyses it has ever been my delight to read.

By my count, Anglophone North America ex Canada is on its fifth legal regime. The First Republic was the Congressional regime, which illegally abolished the British colonial governments. The Second Republic was the Constitutional regime, which illegally abolished the Articles of Confederation. The Third Republic was the Unionist regime, which illegally abolished the principle of federalism. The Fourth Republic is the New Deal regime, which illegally abolished the principle of limited government.

A good way to find the most powerful people in the US is to find the most responsible people. No one in the US is scheming for power. A lot of them seem to be working for change. No one in the US is brainwashing the masses. A lot of them seem to be educating the public. No one in the US is ruling the world. A lot of them seem to be making global policies.

LanguageLog looks at the hyperwhiteness of nerds.

Conspicuous by its absence is any discussion of the historical anomaly of upper and middle class adolescents taking their cultural cues from the underclass.

Being a loser is cool; doesn’t anybody wonder about that?

FuturePundit. I can vouch for it. Every time my grandfather raised his hand in a threatening manner, my ability to retain information improved remarkably.

FuturePundit. I can’t think of anything to use this stuff for, but I’m sure that cleverer people than I will be able to.

Arnold Kling is a fan of consumption taxes.

Politicians frame the issue as taxing certain types of people. Economists look at what activities are being taxed.

Economists, naive fellows that they are, don’t understand the dialectic. The reason politicians concentrate on what people are being taxed is because they are using taxes as a weapon of social policy, to help certain favored groups and punish certain disfavored groups.

Of course, only in our modern dysfunctional world would unproductive people be rewarded and productive people punished. I’d like to be able to say with confidence that in a hundred years people will look back on this system and say, “Geez, what were they thinking?” Unfortunately, it’s only gotten worse in the last hundred years, and I don’t really expect it to get any better in the next hundred. Unless the Muslims take over, in which case taxation rates will be the least of our worries.

LanguageLog. It’s not as easy as it may first appear.

Engadget. And wonder what ever happened to those nice paper ballots that were so easy to check and so difficult to hack.

The problem with paper ballots, of course, is that they take a lot of work to tally, and you can’t have the result by the time the 11 0’clock news comes on. God forbid that accurate elections should take priority over making bureaucrats’ and journlists’ jobs easier.

Oh, and with paper ballots the bureaucrats don’t have a lot of money to splash around. That’s key too.

Read it. Let’s just step back a minute and see what’s going on here.

A major newspaper, the chief paper of the nation’s capital, is expressing an opinion on how people get fat. Think about that for a second.

1. Why do they care? Is this the business of a newspaper? Especially of a major metropolitan newspaper?
2. Is there nothing more important that they could spend their time on?

The study has a lot to say about how and why America has gotten fatter — and how the country can fight what might be fairly described as an epidemic of expanding waistlines.

Ponder the approach. The problem is “how and why America has gotten fatter”. Not certain individuals, who happen to make up an unspecified portion of the population, have gotten fatter (fatter than what?); not certain individuals who happened to figure in the studies that underly the whole handwringing (do these studies say something of general applicability?); but: “America” has gotten fatter. The focus is on the country as a corporate entity; the camera has pulled back so far that we see just a single block called “America”, without being able to make out any details. Just a big lump: America. Fatter.

Ponder the unspoken assumptions. “Fatter is bad.” “The country must fight it.” “It’s like an epidemic.”

Ponder the natural policy implication: “People must be responsible to themselves — and, now, it appears, to others around them — to eat healthy and exercise.” Emphasis added.

Could there be a clearer demonstration of how this house organ for the People of the Crust view the world and their place within it? Everyone is responsible to everyone for everything. Incidentally, you non-ruling-class dweebs are so stupid that you don’t know how to take care of yourselves. Well, you’d better shape up, or… what, exactly? The obvious next step is that the Nanny State is going to be all over your ass like ugly on an ape. Don’t make us come down there.

Does that bother you? It certainly bothers me.

Strange Maps has some very strange maps, but also some that are really cool.

UR. Another examination of how our ruling class operates by the inimitable Mencius Moldbug.

Note, for example, that in this hefty article on terrorism, there is no discussion of actual terrorists. Power seems completely uninterested in the actual motivation and organization of these friends we haven’t gotten to know yet.

Read The Whole Thing.

NYT. Guess it goes to show that you really can’t trust anybody. Fortunately I won’t ever be famous so I won’t have to endure having my private correspondence show up in the New York Times.

NYT. Sometimes the old ways are best.

LGF. Hairsplitting among the children of Satan. I guess being surrounded by lawyers is one of the disadvantages of Hell.

NYT. Merely a matter of time. There’s a role in the world for appliances that do one thing well, and there’s a role for stuff that’s more flexible.

WP.

Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) was more disheartened than ever.

Good. Perhaps soon she’ll decide to come out of the closet as a liberal Democrat and make an honest woman of herself.

NYT. Once one applies a price system to degrees, it will quickly become clear that some are worth a lot, and others are worth a lot of nothing. I can see professors getting hives even as we speak. The prospect is Elysian.

The nice thing about a free market is that it cuts straight through a lot of the bullshit.

LGF. Next they’ll start arresting people for burning copies of Mein Kampf.

It’s now officially a mindcrime in the United States to violate Islamic law.

A piece of advice: Avoid New York. (A good idea in any case, but especially so now.)

ParaPundit. Coming to a neighborhood near you. Aren’t you lucky?

Ross Douthat calls ’em as he sees ’em.

The concept of “Ron Paul sells out” is a disturbing one — if he’s selling, who’s buying?

And, looking at the picture, tell the truth: Who wouldn’t prefer a Big Mac and fries to that crap?

WP. Gee, I wonder why?