WP. Yup, religion of peace alright.

NYT. Well, that’s certainly a load off of my mind.

Engadget. Some people ought not to be allowed to reproduce. We have enough defective genes in circulation as it is.

Item. And good riddance.

WP. I bet you were wondering about that. I know I was.

It would appear to be a slow news day.

NYT. A word with body.

Item. Well, the rest of the Church can, for one.

One day when I was ranting and raving about how much of the Nicene Creed I didn’t believe, he said ‘well, when you’re in church, just say the parts of the creed you do agree with. Be silent for the others. We’re not asking you do so something against your integrity’. And again I thought whew, that’s what one would hope for from a religion — honesty and integrity. And I guess that’s a theme that has carried throughout my life in Ministry — that God wants us to be honest and full of integrity.

Sorry, dude, but if you disagree with the Nicene Creed, then you aren’t a Christian. That’s all there is to it.

And if your “church” doesn’t require you to believe the Nicene Creed, then it isn’t Christian either. That’s a plain historical fact.

LGF. How America produces these people I just don’t know. Must be something in the water.

Cindy Sheehan promised to go away, but unfortunately she was lying.

LGF. Well — there it is.

LGF names names.

Well, you know Americans — they’ll sell you a bullet if they can make a buck from it, even though it’s obvious to the most casual observer that you plan to shoot them with it.

LGF. Muslims are sort of equal-opportunity terrorists — they kill as many of their own as they do of us, seems like, if not more.

I have to agree with Ross Douthat on this one.

Techdirt. I suspect a bureaucracy that has lost its sense of mission.

We’re no longer competing with the Soviets — we’re no longer competing with anybody, really, unless perhaps the Chinese decide to get in the game — and they don’t really have anything they’re trying to accomplish.

It’s just another government agency hanging on past its sell-by date, trying to appear busy while continuing to collect those nice government paychecks.

WSJ. The importance of listening well.

Peggy Noonan points out some inconvenient truths.

We have a potential presidential candidate who noted to a friend that if he won the presidency the quality of his life would go down, not up.

Which makes you wonder why he’s running. I mean, don’t do us any favors.

A general rule: If you are told what someone does for a living and it makes sense to you–orthodontist, store owner, professor–that means he’s not rich. But if it’s a man in a suit who does something that takes him five sentences to explain and still you walk away confused, and castigating yourself as to why you couldn’t understand the central facts of the acquisition of wealth in the age you live in–well, chances are you just talked to a billionaire.

We’ve all had that experience.

Cellphones are wonderful, but they empower the obnoxious and amplify the ignorant.

Truer words were never spoke.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004756.html. Didn’t know Google had a Faculty Summit? Neither did I.

Item. Of course, only in a Blue State would you find a “fundraiser” for an animal species.

 It is one of the oddities of the bonobo world—and a source of frustration to some—that Frans de Waal, of Emory University, the high-profile Dutch primatologist and writer, who is the most frequently quoted authority on the species, has never seen a wild bonobo.

Sounds like the perfect Democrat.

FuturePundit. Only their Ritalin pusher knows for sure.

WP. When it comes to buying votes, America is a one-party state.

WP. Fred realizes that the mainstream views media are worthless. Go, Fred.

NYT. Another self-esteem-raising program for the worthless. And I don’t doubt that the taxpayer will at some point be expected to pay for it.

NYT. And almost everything else, seems like.

NYT. And this is a surprise to who?

All but two of the lawmakers known to be under investigation are Republicans.

And that’s why there’s this article in the New York Times.

NYT. And about time, too. The Indians are a democracy, unlike every Muslim nation on the planet, and know first-hand what a threat Islam poses to non-Islamic nations. They are our natural allies in this war.

NYT. Sure, I’d love to have these people living next door.

NYT. A reminder that the Vatican has been at this stuff longer than almost anybody … outside of Islam.

Techdirt. Or perhaps they’re just partisan hacks who think that passion is a direct substitute for intelligence. That’s my theory. What’s your theory?

LanguageLog. I’ve seen pseudo-Greek as well as pseudo-Hebrew.

WSJ. A hero that not even Arnold Schwarzenegger can screw up.

Steve Sailer asks a very good question: Why are prominent politicians so dim-witted? Is the best the Democrat Party can do John Kerry, somebody who got worse grades in college than George W Bush? Or Al Gore, whose grades at Harvard weren’t much better? Or Ted Kennedy, who was expelled from Harvard for cheating?

Although, as with stocks, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar, and nobody could call him all that bright. And Russ Feingold was also a Rhodes scholar, and (judging by his recent public statements) probably can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

The problem, I think, lies with the American political system, which rewards a certain low peasant cunning rather than true intellectual quality.

LanguageLog. Our culture is unraveling before our very eyes. Surely this is not news.

And the New York Times is in it up to their blood-stained elbows. Surely this is not news either.

LanguageLog. I’m all about peevology, as you might suspect.

WSJ. It’s the Heinlein centennial, so brace yourselves.

When one looks at the great technological revolutions that have shaped our lives over the past 50 years, more often than not one finds that the men and women behind them were avid consumers of what used to be considered no more than adolescent trash.

He who laughs last, laughs best.

FuturePundit. This is very exciting. There are a lot of underutilized house roofs out there.

Engadget. Great news for prosthetics. We may wind up with the Bionic Man sooner than we think.

Engadget. Wouldn’t this make a great guard-bot?

Engadget. Looks like the format wars are starting into the endgame.

NYT. Truly, most people think that history started when they were born.

 Add to this the favorite fact of human resource managers everywhere: this is the first time in history that four generations — those who lived through World War II, Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y — are together in the workplace.

And I’m sure she even believes that.

UR. Mencius Moldbug is on the case.

Today I thought it’d be fun to talk about democracy. Unless you are 107 years old and a veteran of the Austrian Landwehr, you probably associate democracy with peace, freedom, progress and prosperity. Since I associate democracy with war, tyranny, destruction and poverty, we certainly have something to talk about.

The article is full of stuff like this.

Universalism is the faith of the Brahmins, the intellectual caste whose global dominance has been unchallenged arguably since World War II, and certainly since the end of the Cold War. Since an intellectual is defined by his or her ability to influence the opinions of others, it’s not hard to see why democracy is such an effective political formula. Democracy means that popular opinion controls the State; intellectuals guide popular opinion; ergo, intellectuals guide the State.

John Kerry? Sure sounds like.

Very generally, the consensus at Harvard at year Y is the consensus of America at Y+50. If this isn’t power, what is?

Read The Whole Thing.

NYT. So they don’t even try to hide the fact that this is all about buying votes.

So what do we do about this structurally corrupt system? Oh, and have a nice day.

WT. It’s all about posturing.

Item. I’ll bet you didn’t know that Norway had a psychic princess.

Well, you do now.

David Pogue has the goods.

Jeremy Wagstaff certainly wasn’t born yesterday.

I’ve been getting these for a month now and just delete them, figuring them for spam. Apparently it’s more nefarious than that.

Engadget. Never trust a weapon made by the lowest bidder.

WP. And about time too. The problem is that the people at the Washington Post want America to lose. Not that they’d ever admit that, of course.

NYT. Well. There it is.

Engadget. Some positive news for a change. Better savor it; it doesn’t happen all that often.

Techdirt. The available evidence suggests that there’s an IQ test for Congress: Too high and they don’t let you in.

It will come as no surprise that the chief proponent is Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), an idiot representing idiots and a walking example that true democratic representation doesn’t guarantee adult behavior.

But there’s certainly enough obloquy to go around; there are equally moronic Republicans participating in the pile-on.

Engadget. Watch Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have heart attacks and die.