Read it.

Hey, we’re Americans. That’s what we do.

Read it.

Ain’t no “maybe” about it. If the Pentagon doesn’t fix our Iraq rotation policy, and quickly, we’ll be left with an Army full of Generals and Privates.

Jeremy Wagstaff is always worth reading.

The bigger solution, of course, is to ditch the whole ‘presentation thing’ in favor of participation. I know my class are more attentive if they know I’m going to ask random questions of them. An audience is going to be more attentive if the speaker is not merely droning on but offering a compelling performance and engaging them as much as possible. A meeting leader is going to have the attention of the room if s/he doesn’t waste their valuable day giving some PR schtick but keeps it short and genuinely meets the other participant, rather than lectures them.

The truest thing you’ll read today. Nobody checks e-mail in Kingsfield’s class.

This is where a tablet PC comes into its own. Not only does your note-taking (or whatever else you’re doing) look like traditional scribble-on-legal-pad activity, most tablets come with an unobtrusive built-in microphone quite adequate to capture a speaker or lecturer. Run the result through a program like Dragon Naturally Speaking and you have a verbatim transcript of the talk. Meld this with your notes in a program like OneNote, and you’re shiny.

Which is why I’m waiting for Apple to come out with a decent tablet. C’mon, Steve, get on the stick. And I want at least a 14″ screen.

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A very clever idea.

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All there in black and white.

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The major enemy of capitalism is capitalists.

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I was forced to see that, beyond the contingency of the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism that has appeared on a global level, the root of evil is inherent in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictive.

Repeating for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible.

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Well, duh. A brat kid will likely turn out to be a brat adult. That’s just observed fact.

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Read it.

Good news, for a change, although the Post, like most newspapers, is trying to circle the wagons.

WITH A 20-page opinion handed down March 7, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton sent a shudder through journalists and their would-be sources.

And that’s a shudder that needs to happen. “Journalists” like to think of themselves as somehow observers standing outside of the process, ready to record and “tell the story” but not get involved. This is, of course, hogwash. They are involved, and the stories they tell are seen through the warped lens of people committed to “activism”, whether beneficial or not. The basic problem is that “journalists” are biased, but don’t realize it, and are unwilling to admit it because it would mean admitting that they live a lie.

Judge Walton’s opinion removes any protection that government news sources have come to rely on.

Including the ones that reveal legitimate secrets, which no editorial discussion of the matter has deigned to address. One gets the impression, from listening to the drive-by media, that there is no such thing as a legitimate secret. Those who cannot see the obvious implications for personal privacy are mentally deficient.

If allowed to stand, it would seriously impair the ability of journalists not only to expose malfeasance and corruption but also to provide thorough coverage of institutions such as the Justice Department.

In other words, they won’t be able to be as nosy as they’d like to be.  Hint: Whenever a “journalist” utters the phrase “the public’s right to know”, what they actually mean is “my right to stick my nose into your business and put it on the front page”. They don’t really give a shit about “the public”, because if they did they wouldn’t go around undermining the public good with their inflammatory reporting.

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I find the following particularly trenchant:

Candor is surely the necessary starting point for a useful national conversation on race (the one that Obama didn’t seem to want to have until his pastor got him in political hot water). One side says, “You’re scared of young black men.” The other side says, “Yes, and here’s why.” Progress becomes possible. One side says, “You get all these breaks just because of your race.” The other side says ,”We have to be twice as good to get the same respect.” If you don’t ever have the argument you probably can’t get over the argument.

Jeremy Wagstaff on the unrealized potential of Starbuck’s.

I find it interesting that his mind would automatically go to what sort of things could be marketed to these hangers-on at coffee shops. Is that distinctively American, or merely human?

Inside Politics.

Inside the Beltway.

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Read it.

Read it.

The Naked Ape meets Up the Organization.

Of course, no mention is made, in this Rousseauian analysis, of the observations of Hobbes. A glaring omission.

Fred has the answer.

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I’m down wit dat.

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Guess what? You have to be of a certain level of importance to get an entry in Wikipedia. Who decides? Apparently it’s impossible to say.

Whatever it is, I suspect that you and I don’t qualify.

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Successful attempts to shift the responsibility for bad decisions toward others and to society more generally create a “moral hazard” in behavior. If individuals are not held accountable for decisions and actions that harm themselves or others, they have less incentive to act responsibly in the first place since they will escape some or all of the bad consequences of their actions.

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1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here.

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Read it.

Is AlGore over there by any chance?

Cringely is nearly always worth reading.

The last major change to the way we educate children and young adults came with the introduction of the textbook in the 16th century. I think it’s about time.

We have the technology for inexpensive, individualized custom-paced education. Let’s use it.

Read it. Read it twice.

Democrats in general, I would submit, confuse change with improvement. They fail to weigh the costs and benefits of change, to consider its unintended consequences, or to worry about what we need to conserve and how we might go about doing that faithfully. They ask Americans to embrace change for its own sake, in the faith that history is governed by a law of progress, which guarantees that change is almost always an improvement. The ability to bring about historical change, then, becomes the highest mark of the liberal leader.

And those are the truest words you’ll read today.

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Hey, somebody has to replace what they’re paid to put that junk on your box in the first place.

It’s like a classic Marx brothers routine: “How much do you charge for not practicing?” “You couldn’t afford it.”

Avoid Sony. You Have Been Warned.

Read it.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, my granny use to say.

But when prevention contradicts the Fashionable Liberal Lifestyle, the Chattering Class would rather wring their hands and call for more spending on possible cures.  (Can you spell “AIDS”? I’m sure you can.)

What astonishes me is that this article actually appeared in a White People newspaper like the Washington Post. Somebody must be asleep at the switch over there.

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I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.

Let’s trademark our buzzwords and sue anybody who is stupid enough to believe them to be valuable.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

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Notice that no mention is made of the silly leftoid policies that produce these harsh results for the groups for which the leftoids proclaim their greatest love.

Gas is expensive? Well, we could drill more wells (like in ANWR) and build more refineries to bring the price down. But the leftoids say, No, No, No.

Food expensive? Well, we could shit-can the stupid ethanol mandate that is raising the price of bread and meat products. But the leftoids say, No, No, No.

Chickens, meet Roost. Roost, meet Chickens.

And yet The Poor will keep voting for The Left, the very people who are screwing them. What a world.

Read it.

Where in the world do we find such people?

The quilt dotted with American flags that covered her bed and the massive flag on her wall during her childhood years in Georgia and Minnesota help explain why the daughter of Dave and Marlene Hoffman voluntarily joined the Army ROTC program as an undergraduate at the University of Colorado.

Oh, yeah. Not New York or Boston or San Francisco or L.A.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Of course, the Usual Suspects will characterize this as a Republican plot.

As if there were any Republicans employed  by the State Department. Let’s get back to reality, shall we?

(Now, if the suggestion is that a couple of Democrats in the State Department are sufficiently venal to sell information to their ideological enemies, well, that I’d believe.)

What I don’t believe is that, say, the McCain campaign, which has planted both boots on a fellow for just sending around a link to a YouTube video mocking Obama’s link to racist preacher Wright, would be involved at all. And nobody else cares.

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This has texture, and scope.

The New York Times is, of course, the Official House Organ of White People.

I’m somewhat disappointed that, among the Things Mentioned, they didn’t include “Looking Down Your Trendier-Than-Thou Yuppie Nose At FlyOver Country”. That really ought to be in there.

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Hope the people who held gold when it was $1000 an ounce took the opportunity to cash in. This stuff always goes up and down — I remember when gold hit $800 an ounce, people were running around in circles and jumping up and down … and then it went back to about $200.

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The question remains as to whether it’s more efficient than just using the liquid fuel in the first place.

Tom Stoppard. Yes, that Tom Stoppard.

Yeah, that’s pretty much the way I remember it.

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Because of slave labor in China, apparently.

Wonder whether this would work with illegal immigrants from south of the border. Hm.

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I hadn’t realized that being a new doctor was so much like being a college football player.

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If you aren’t familiar with Google Documents, you need to be.

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Well, duh – that’s where their money comes from.

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While it’s good he wasn’t expelled, it’s difficult to see how the school can justify this type of punishment either. Here’s a student trying to help both himself and the rest of the class better learn the subject matter, and he’s punished for it? That doesn’t seem right.

Well, it is Canada….

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No doubt a natural affinity — like calls to like and all that.

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Read it.

Though many would have you believe that white people come of age at Summer Camp, it’s simply not the truth. Immediately following graduation but prior to renovating a house, white people take their first step from childhood to maturity by hosting a successful dinner party.

The dinner party is the opportunity for white people to be judged on their taste in food, wine, furniture, art, interior design, music, and books. Outside of dictatorships and a few murder trials, there might not be a more rigorous judgment process in the modern world.

Inside Politics.

Inside the Beltway.

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Hey, the system actually works.

I rather think that Ron Paul’s backers were slight enough already.

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Yeah, racism kept him from getting into Harvard. (Oops, I guess it didn’t.)

And racism kept him from getting into Harvard Law. (Oops, I guess it didn’t.)

And racism kept him from getting elected head of the Law Review. (Oops, I guess it didn’t.)

And racism kept him from elective office. (Oops, I guess it didn’t.)

And racism kept him from being elected to the Senate. (Oops, I guess it didn’t.)

And racism kept him from getting a book deal worth millions. (Oops, I guess it didn’t.)

And racism kept his wife from getting a 100% pay raise after her husband got elected to the Senate. (Oops, I guess it didn’t.)

Yeah, tell us about all the racism you’ve had to suffer through, Barack.

Are you going to be this much of a whiner if you get the nomination? I guess you will.

Read it.

I’d buy one, if I could afford it.

Same reason I drive a car with an automatic transmission: Young people have time to fiddle with their environment; adults have better things to do.

Read it.

And no, it’s not about religion.