Read it. In case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it. Virtual worlds may be more useful than we think.

Read it. Most people think of a church as this building where you go to get preached at. How superficial.

Read it. Sports gets more and more serious.

Read it. Something that the tree-huggers don’t seem to have cottoned to yet; but when they do, be prepared for apocalyptic whining.

Read it. This looks very promising.

Read it. Gene therapy could be big if they ever get the bugs ironed out.

Read it. Yeah, it’s stupid, but I bet they sell a shitload in Seattle. For those whose rear hatch bike rack isn’t sufficiently pretentious….

Read it.

Read it. Amazing how talented the government can be when it comes to messing things up. And yet the progs want them in charge of everything.

Read it. Let’s put Syria on the “regime change” menu.

Read it. Europeans are waking up to the reality that their “myth of the moderate Muslim” is merely a fantasy. Will they ignore the bell and go back to sleep? I guess we’ll find out.

Read it. The issues here are complicated, and raise moral questions with which each of us may one day have to deal.

Read it. I suppose he figures that, if OJ can get off by playing the race card, it’s worth a shot.

Read it. Not only funny but it expresses a very serious truth.

Read it. “Tom Tomorrow” is obviously a communist, as you can tell from his treatment, but it’s mildly entertaining.

Read it. Book lovers appreciate great libraries the way sports fans appreciate great stadia. In both cases the new ones are spiffy and have more amenities but the old ones are the ones with character.

Read it. Most of us have tried chess at one point or another. We then decided to grow up and get a life. We still retain an affection for books about chess and the lives of chess players, especially famous chess players, much as people like to read Stephen King novels. Tyler Cowan is one of us in that respect.

Read it. As with most everything in the NYT, both this review and the book it is nominally about, Hannah Rosin’s God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America about Patrick Henry College, deals with Christianity the way Margaret Mead dealt with the Samoans.

One could just as easily titled the book and/or the review Down the Alimentary Canal With Gun and Camera. Obviously Nina Easton and Hannah Rosin have heard about Christians but don’t really know any, other than superficially. Rosin at least makes an attempt, but it’s clear that neither of them can get beyond the clichés that were drilled into them in school and reinforced by the narrow prog circles in which they move. A pity.

These are the enemy, folks. They don’t know anything, and they don’t want to learn anything.

Read it. Steven Heller talks about typography. Jonathan Barnbook, for example, is a perfect postmodern typographer:

In fact, once they have been decoded, Barnbrook’s distinctive style can be appreciated as a personal expression in the service of mass communication, usually containing a social or political agenda.

In other words, he’s a prog dork determined to infect the world of type as similar prog dorks have infected art and fashion and politics. Indeed, most of the article is an almost self-parodying example of modern artsy-fartsy prose — so don’t bother reading it if you have a low pain theshhold for that sort of thing. But if you can stand it, it’s entertaining.

Safire on language. Always worth reading.

Read it. For those who have everything.

Read it. Now that is just scary.

Cringely talkes about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Neither Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs is anywhere close to what one might define as “normal,” but in these procedural things, Gates is a lot more normal than Jobs.

Don’t that just say it all?

Wisdom. Attend.

Read it. My favorite part:

“We want to see action, not just nice words. We have to push for a change in the law,” he said. “Muslims need legal protection against the desecration of the Prophet Muhammad, maybe something similar to the protection enjoyed by Jews and homosexuals.”

My plan: Pass a law that says Muslims (and only Muslims) can engage in same-sex “marriage”. That ought to prove quite entertaining.

“Pearls Before Swine” and “Agnes”. See the sidebar.

Oh, and if you see any on the list that you think suck, let me know that too. There are a couple that I consider dogs, but other readers like them. It’s not as if it costs anything to keep the link.

Read it. Some useful advice.

Read it. Just when you think that Democrats have gotten about as shameless as they can get, they manage to surprise you.

Peggy Noonan.

Read it. Why people have this fetish about keeping large and heterogeneous “countries” intact has always puzzled me. India, for example, ought to be about 12 separate nations — because it is, these are places with different languages and different cultures. Similarly, Iraq ought to be three separate, more homogeneous states. Everyone would be a lot happier.

Read it. I’ve been waiting for this one. Actually, it’s pretty clever.

Read it. This is a great time to be alive.

Paul Graham. I suspect he’s right.

Practically everyone thinks that someone who went to MIT or Harvard or Stanford must be smart. Even people who hate you for it believe it.

But when you think about what it means to have gone to an elite college, how could this be true? We’re talking about a decision made by admissions officers—basically, HR people—based on a cursory examination of a huge pile of depressingly similar applications submitted by seventeen year olds. And what do they have to go on? An easily gamed standardized test; a short essay telling you what the kid thinks you want to hear; an interview with a random alum; a high school record that’s largely an index of obedience. Who would rely on such a test?

I certainly can’t provide any evidence from my own life to prove him wrong.

Read it. Unfortunately, the people who need to read this book won’t, and the people who will read it don’t need to.

Read it. And wonder why you don’t see this good news in the major media outlets.

Read it. I must confess to being curious as to where the “electronic book” thing is going to wind up.

Read it.

It seems that some environmentalists are more interested in producing guilt than in reducing carbon.

That’s it precisely. For non-Brahmin environmentalists, “carbon credits” are at best a halfway stage on the way to decivilization; their only advantage is that it wins them the first stage of the argument, which is getting civilized people feeling guilty for not living in straw huts with outhouses.

Read it. And come, let us plod:

• The reason interest rates are what they are is because that’s the market-determined rate of risk for such loans, as determined by a lot of very highly-educated people (and computer programs) whose jobs depend on their being right about this sort of stuff.
• The way the government “halves interest rates” is by extending enough full-faith-and-credit-of-every-poor-sap-taxpayer guarantees to reduce the risk, which is reflected in the interest rate.
• The result of this is that people get loans who ordinarily wouldn’t, because they are too much of a risk.
• This means that, on down the line, these people default on the loans, which the government (i.e. YOU), because of the guarantees, has to pay for.

Which makes this statement…

Democrats described the legislation as costless to taxpayers, saying the rate cuts would be offset by a reduction of nearly $21 billion in subsidies paid by the government to lenders in the federal loan program.

… a rather obvious bald-faced lie; to the extent that it brings the rate of interest below the free-market rate, it will actually increase the amount of subsidies paid by the government to lenders in the federal loan program. But not for a couple of decades, by which time the Democrats in question will be safely retired with their cushy government pensions and countless bridges and roads named after Senator/Congressman Porkbelly.

Mencius Moldbug has, of course, his own unique take on the subject. As always, budget some time for this one.

Read it. Well, presumably it will keep them off the streets.

Read it.

Congressional Democrats, who criticized Republicans for not fixing the alternative minimum tax when they were in power, have been unable to unify behind a plan to protect the growing number of middle-class families hit by the tax.

And that tells you everything you need to know about how TOTALLY USELESS the Democratic party is.

Read it. Yeah, well, talks cheap — let’s see some raids, maybe even some indictments.

Read it. Correction: Something other than a job.

Read it. After all, who are we to judge these quaint native customs?

Tyler Cowan discusses the gold standard.

Read it. Oh, I like this one.

Read it. This is why blue states are bleeding people and business to red states.

Read it. Note the fact that this is a thinly-disguised screed against Texas and the use of force to defend one’s dwelling place.

To begin with, the musician wasn’t “banging on a door”, he was trying to kick the door in. That’s attempted breaking & entering, right there.

The guy was warned off but wouldn’t go away. The homeowner deliberately shot high (as he thought), but the guy was six-foot-five (an unusual height, I would say) and was struck by the bullet.

Marsha McCartney, president of the North Texas chapter of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, called Mr. Albrecht’s death “one more gun tragedy.”

Wel, it was certainly a tragedy, but it’s hard to see how it’s a gun tragedy. One of the uses of guns is to defend yourself when a 6’5″ guy hallucinating on drugs comes trying to kick your door down. This sort of tragedy can be avoided by, hey, staying off other people’s property and refraining from attempting to break into somebody’s house at 4 a.m.

Read it. And let that be a lesson to us all.

On the other hand, to die from “popcorn worker’s lung” ought to be worth a line or two in the paper….