WT. Of course a guy who’s half black solicits the support of an explicitly racist organization. Democrats have no problem with that.

LGF. Religion of peace, indeed.

LGF. And why not? Just another area in which we depend on foreigners to do the jobs that Americans won’t do….

The question I have is: Why rebuild it? This isn’t a luxury resort, or even a housing development.

Hey, refugees! Go to Beirut! or Amman! or Cairo! Find a job! Get a life!

And who’s going to pay the necessary “hundreds of millions of dollars” to do this “rebuilding”?

Somehow I don’t think I’ll like the answer.

LanguageLog. Quite agree, quite agree, too silly, too silly.

LanguageLog. It’s about time….

LGF. Is there a more blatant oxymoron in any language than “U.N. Peacekeeper”?

Engadget. Well, it’s about time.

Jeremy Wagstaff has some interesting things to say.

It’s worth remembering that if we are not happy with our computers, it’s not all the computer’s fault.

And that’s truth in any universe. His focus is Collecting Stuff, Brainstorming, and Thinking Stuff Up.

Read The Whole Thing. Then go out and do.

UR. I think. Or maybe not. Read it for yourself.

FuturePundit. More progress.

WP. You would think that highly intelligent technical people would know better.

The Googlers, for their part, are used to the attention from presidential candidates eager to add a hip, online-savvy, we-get-it aspect to their résumés, as well as to wrap themselves in the aura of one of the nation’s great business success stories.

So if you can’t be productive, attempt to associate yourselves with people who are. There’s American politics in a nutshell for you.

Well, as Mike Ford used to say, remember that intelligence and wisdom are separate rolls.

That’s a headline from today’s Washington Post, but I’m not even going to link to it, because it could be applied to every damned thing that goes on in Washington day by day. Open any major metropolitan newspaper, poke your finger down at random, and bet that this headline will describe the story. You’ll make enough money to live well.

WSJ. Words of wisdom from a Nobel Laureate:

Persistent poverty and environmental degradation in developing countries, changing global climatic patterns, and the use of food crops to produce biofuels, all pose new and unprecedented risks and opportunities for global agriculture in the years ahead.

But of course we have to buy locally, or we’ll destroy the planet and undo all of AlGore’s wonderful work.

Engadget. A picture is worth a thousand words.

WT. Would that include helping discourage illegal immigration?

NCLR leaders and members at the group’s annual convention in Miami Beach, which began yesterday, say they will have to start a campaign to register and mobilize voters, to warn against crossing the line in the debate and to force lawmakers to take a clear stand on what they are willing to tolerate.

Nope, apparently not.

NYT. This is an excellent idea. Most of these guys are being hung out to dry by their candy-assed superiors for judgment calls that wouldn’t have been blinked at in prior wars. They’re basically political scapegoats. Soldiers don’t operate under the same rules as police officers; they can’t, and its the height of asininity to jump on them for not doing so.

Engadget. Not sure what this will be useful for, but I like the idea.

FuturePundit. Do the guys in Iraq know about this?

Engadget. More good news. I’m waiting for these things to be used in place of RAM in personal computers.

Jeremy Wagstaff. Further adventures with PersonalBrain.

Engadget. Expensive high tech and Third World vegetation food — what yuppie could resist? I’ll bet Al Gore is the first on his block to get one. Oh, wait, he’s the only one on his block…. Well, we’ll have to come up with another cliche to use with People of the Crust.

StrangeMaps. I’m not quite sure what it all means, but it looks pretty cool.

WP. Whoa — reality intrudes into the fanciful world of politics. Will the magic all go away? Stay tuned.

NYT. Remind me what the U.N. is good for. Take all the time you need.

NYT. Religion of peace indeed.

NYT. This is absurd. Either the guy did it or he didn’t. If he did it, he ought to go to jail. If he didn’t, he ought to go free. None of this “well, you kinda sorta did it”.

WT. Now, this is just stupid. Whatever one may think of the merits of the case, the cure to political intrusion into the legal process is not more political intrusion into the legal process.

Joel Spolsky brings up a problem that we’ve all seen. Fortunately I don’t have that problem here, but I might someday, so I was interested to see what he had to say.

MEQ. I know you don’t care. Read it anyway.

Language Log. Who knew fly genes had such an exciting history? No, really.

Review of Kasparov’s new book, which I cannot wait to read. (Well, I can, really; that’s just an expression)

Steve Sailer has some VERY interesting things to say about IQ … and about economists.

Cringely is on the case.

Engadget. Not sure how this will work in practice, but the concept is pretty cool.

Item. Where Jonah Goldberg finds these things I have no idea.

Norman Geras has something interesting to say about human rights, a topic on which too many people have uninteresting things to say.

Oddly enough, the position he quotes Andrew Sullivan as espousing is very close to the position on the “rights of Englishmen” as delineated by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France; quite the closest Andrew Sullivan has come to a conservative position as long as I’ve been exposed to him. (Hm. Perhaps the wrong phrase.)

There is an alternative to the will of God for grounding, justifying, human rights. This lies in the nature of human beings, and the needs, interests and capacities they all have by virtue precisely of being human beings and sharing a common nature.

… a position with which neither Aristotle nor Aquinas would have a problem, although Aquinas would dispute the purported lack of connection.

FuturePundit. In interesting question that I fear has not been much on my mind.

Techdirt. Apparently newspapers are among the middlemen getting eliminated.

Item. The real America is still out there, you just have to search for it.

Item. Yup, rioting is really the solution.

Item. It’s all about spin.

Review. Of course it can’t be as entertaining as Moby Dick.

LGF.

The real victims of this idiotic vote will be the airline industries, as people increasingly choose not to travel rather than go through the gamut of craziness.

Already there….

LGF. Progress of a sort.

WT. And about time too.

Engadget. I’m not too sure about this….

NYT. A devastating blow to codgers everywhere. (Oh, wait, it’s the New York Times — better verify that through a second source.)

Engadget. Excellent news.

Guardian. That about says it all.

Robert Kagan takes a cold-eyed look at the modern world.