NYT. Note the headline: Rahmat Abdhir is just a “Californian”. No doubt he’ll soon be singing with the Beach Boys.

LGF. Get a glimpse of the future today, dhimmi.

PowerLine. Hey, it doesn’t matter if it’s not true — it ought to have been true, and the story serves a Higher Purpose. These are the new ruling class. Aren’t we lucky?

LGF. Truly, the realm of politics has some strange denizens. (How do you become a denizen of the realm of politics? By being unnaturalized, of course.)

Techdirt. Can’t say that this is all that much of a surprise. I mean, who works for the government? Affirmative action hires and other people who can’t make it in the real world of working adults. Not the sharpest knives in the drawer, you might say.

LGF. Freedom of speech among the Kossaks. With video.

Do you have trouble distinguishing (by appearance) Hillary Clinton and Barbara Walters? I do.

Cringely is pessimistic.

LGF. One word: Leavenworth.

Arnold Kling looks at an interesting proposal by Tyler Cowan.

Read it. If you aren’t living off of the government (i.e. the rest of us), how lame is that?

Read it. Religion of peace, oh yeah.

Techdirt. An excellent question. Pardon my cynicism, but I can think of a number of sordid possibilities.

For those unfamiliar with the subject, here are the priorities of a typical bureaucrat:

1. Keeping my job. (Not doing my job, but keeping my job.)
2. Keeping my boss happy.
3. Keeping my friends happy, preferably by giving them government jobs too.
4. Keeping my boss’s friends happy.
5. Keeping the politician we all work for happy.
6. Keeping happy the people who give money make sure that the politician we all work for keeps his job.
7. Keeping happy the people who rally blocs of dimwitted but nevertheless voting public to make sure that the politician we all work for keeps his job.
8. Any step necessary to get me a better (i.e. same work, more money) job.
9. Keeping the people who agree with me politically happy.

You will note that “taxpayers” and “the public interest” have no place on the list.

PEGGY NOONAN.

WSJ. An excellent review of how badly this country is degenerating.

Kimberley Strassel points out how Democrats may just possibly be finally getting it through their thick skulls that taxes aren’t just tapping into the Great Money Pot in the Sky, but actually have real-world consequences — many of which they might not particularly like.

LanguageLog. A timely reminder that things are not always as they seem.

LGF. Just a civil rights group, sure.

NYT. Will there be feminist protests about gender wage inequality? I rather doubt it.

NYT. This might resolve a few conflicts.

WT. Well, that’s a disappointment.

WT. Surprised it took him that long. Sometimes it feels like the 16th century all over again.

NYT. Been waitin’ for this one.

Read it. Spam is actually rather good, if you fry it. Let’s try that trick on spammers. Hey, it might work.

LGF. Unfortunately, he’s right. If Americans truly understood Islam, he’d have been lynched long since.

Read it. No, the rich love you. There’s a difference. Trust a “journalist” to confuse the two.

But wait: These new Greenwich/Manhattan billionaires happen to be donors, friends, and constituents of Democrats–not Republicans. What’s a presidential candidate to do?

Ask what they know that you don’t. Hmmm?

Engadget. The problem with this approach, of course, is that it discourages people from doing it your way. If they don’t do it your way, then your way doesn’t become the standard; either everybody develops his own way, in which case there is no standard, or people do it somebody else’s way (somebody else who wasn’t quite as discouraging), and you’re stuck being the odd one out.  One would think that the history of personal computers is sufficiently littered with the corpses of companies and products who tried to keep a stranglehold on their “intellectual property” and as a result got left at the station when the train got underway.

Jerry Pournelle is fond of telling a story about going to a computer convention (COMDEX or something similar) back when Microsoft and IBM were just getting into the graphical user interface business. He first went to the IBM booth and told them he was considering developing products for OS/2, what could they do for him? They demonstrated a set of tools that would cost him somewhere on the close order of a couple thousand dollars. He mentioned that that was quite a bit of money, and they responded that these were very valuable tools. He then went over to the Microsoft booth and made the same pitch with respect to Windows. They gave him a bag and told him to hold it open, and he could barely stagger away with the development tools they loaded him down with.

And we all know who won that fight, right?

Anyway, I think this a very shortsighted move on Apple’s part — assuming, of course, that they don’t do something unexpected, like licensing the patented stuff for free use by anybody who wants to. Steve Jobs often does unexpected things, but when it comes to narrowing his market share, he’s pretty consistent. So I expect this to bite them on the butt at some future time.

NYT. This is another area that will be worth watching for the next few years.

Read it.

 The western left seems always to be behaving as if they want to tear down the government and the culture that supports it while not admitting to the knowledge that were there to be a change of regime, even a leftist one, the vast majority of them would be among the very first to be purged, imprisoned or marginalized by whatever autocratic or totalitarian regime arose in its place. They are literally sitting on the limb that they appear to be trying to saw off.

Read it twice, because you’ll miss stuff the first time. I did.

An incredible resource.

LanguageLog. Are women more talkative than men? Let the market decide.

UR. The inimitable Mencius Moldbug has some interesting things to say about the field of “computer science”, a field composed of academics who suddenly woke up one day and realized that the employment prospects for math majors were not all that better than those for English majors and that they’d have to get a Real Job, like, soon.

So here’s the first thing that’s wrong with CS research: there’s no such thing as CS research. First, there is no such thing as “computer science.” Except for a few performance tests and the occasional usability study, nothing any CS researcher does has anything to do with the Scientific Method. Second, there is no such thing as “research.” Any activity which is not obviously productive can be described as “research.” The word is entirely meaningless. All just semantics, of course, but it’s hardly a good sign that even the name is fraudulent.

“Computer Science” is like “gender studies”, a way for people who want to play for a living can get funding from governments and other people who ought to know better.

 The reason why CS research produces so little that can be called creative programming these days is that the modern process of grant-funded research is fundamentally incompatible with the task of writing interesting, cool and relevant software. Rather, its goal is to produce publications and careers, and it’s very good at that.

Read The Whole Thing.

Techdirt. They’d have to endure the drop in social status, however.

NYT. Only People of the Crust could have an argument about this.

WSJ. Celebrity is no vaccine against acting like an idiot. In fact, there’s a pretty strong correlation.

The simple idea that Mr. Bonds and Ms. Lohan ought to go find something resembling a church to offset the compulsions of modern life drives the no-religion people nuts. If so, they should stop making funny jokes about sprinkling holy water and start proposing an alternative way to learn integrity, self-respect and character that will have a longer shelf-life than “Don’t Be Evil.”

Funny how that works.

WE. Poor Hillary! Nobody wants to treat her as if she matters.

“I couldn’t care less what Dick Cheney says about me. But when he plays politics with the lives of our troops, you had better be sure I’m going to respond. And I know that you want to respond too.”

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, sweetheart, but Dick Cheney couldn’t care less what you say about him, either. And as far as “playing politics with the lives of our troops”, giving an anti-war Senator such operational details as how we plan to withdraw from Iraq would be exactly that.

NYT. So young, and already a Yuppie. The People of the Crust train the next generation.

Engadget. Perhaps Global Warming will solve our energy crisis. AlGore would have a heart attack, and die.

LanguageLog. I had no idea.

LanguageLog. Probably doesn’t have anything to do with Global Warming, but one never knows.

StrangeMaps. Why not just go with hexagons, as with a wargame map? We’ll probably never know.

Techdirt. Disintermediation is biting the realtor business right square on the butt.

NYT. The Times is truly a gift that keeps on giving.

It is a testament, perhaps, to the fact that, compared with other immigrant groups, Indians tend to speak English when they arrive and are ready to assume a place in the middle class.

Oh, ya think? Plus they aren’t trying to blow us up. That’s a big plus in my book.

I guess assimilation works, huh? And you don’t have to give up your culture to do it, eh? What a surprise.

NYT. I see: Killing unborn children is within medical ethics, but preventing terrorists from starving themselves to death is not. Ah, it’s all clear to me now.

WP. I give up — why do we, the U.S. taxpayers, need to fork out billions of dollars to teach immigrants English?

LGF. And receives an appropriate response.

NYT. But of course we can’t use DDT because that would be bad for the environment. As piles of rotting human corpses apparently are not.

NYT. There’s a headline you don’t see every day. Guess it’s really not a matter of principle after all.

NYT. Notice that they don’t name the eight nay-sayers, from which (this being the Times) one can assume that they were Democrats.

NYT. Well, no, not really. It’s just the first of what I predict will be an amazing number of similar articles laying the groundwork for future “commentators” to cast doubt on the Chief Justice’s judicial opinions. If he were a left-wing member of the court, this would disappear in a week. But the moonbats will be echoing it forever, as with Bush’s youthful drinking problem.