Read it.

No, it just seems like five years.

Read it.

Once a frat boy, always a frat boy.

On the other hand, I can’t see Barack Obama doing that.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

Or at least Europe.

Read it.

They actually pay people to come up with this stuff.

(Well, I don’t really know that — it’s entirely possible to have it done by a computer program.)

Read it.

Note that the “National Cathedral” in question is Episcopalian, which tells you a lot about American culture.

Unfortunately, both the Episcopalian church and American culture are unravelling at an ever-increasing pace.

Read it.

This is one of the best analyses of the current situation I’ve seen.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Not surprisingly, players in all countries chose to give up some money to punish freeloaders. The difference was in how the freeloaders reacted to being punished. In prosperous countries, the cheaters tended to respond to punishment by mending their ways. In the more uproarious countries, however, the bad guys just got mad and hit back.

In countries with democratic market economies, peer pressure goaded people to cooperate. Among authoritarian societies or those dominated more by ties of kinship, freeloaders instead lashed out at those who censured them, the researchers found.

That explains a lot about the Middle East.

Read it.

And the octopus draws its tentacles ever tighter.

Read it.

Starship troopers, here we come.

George Will points out that whenever politicians come up with a complicated “solution” for a problem that exists primarily in the media-fueled fantasy world of public opinion, it’s all about money and power for the Overclass.

AlGore isn’t bleating about Global Warming because he’s worried about the fate of the earth — if he were, he wouldn’t have a carbon footprint as big as King Kong. He’s pushing it because it stuffs his pockets with dollar bills.

Read it.

A public school principal in Texas who arranged for an Islamic instruction presentation for students by an organization whose leaders have been linked to terror groups apparently arranged for that indoctrination after being told not to by her district’s superintendent, parents have told WND.

Read it.

The parents of a blind seven-year-old who was sent to a religious school in Pakistan have told how he was hung by his feet from a ceiling and beaten to death after failing to memorise the Koran.

Read it.

Ships, helicopters … what is Greenpeace’s carbon footprint these days?

Read it.

At American Thinker, William Tate observes that other publishers approached by McClellan don’t even recognize it as the same book.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Modern Western culture, dominated as it is by status striving among whites to score points off each other by most fervently embracing “The Other,” has largely become dependent upon a tiny handful of Others to say the things that need to be said.

Read it.

A French court has annulled the marriage of two French Muslims because the husband complained his wife was not the virgin she had claimed to be. His lawyer won the case by arguing a civil marriage is a legal contract and lying about an important element in it amounts to fraud. Religion had nothing to do with it, he argued, and the court agreed.

Isn’t it amazing how Muslims can game Western legal systems in ways that non-Muslims would never be allowed to get away with?

Read it.

Yet another piece of condescension by an Overclass bureaucrat.

“In other words, upper class people can responsibly choose to smoke a cigar, but poor people need to have choices taken away from them.”

Read it.

I think much the same thing is happening in the adoption process and at the local animal shelter. It’s not that adoption case-workers or pet shelter volunteers are consciously wasting peoples’ time to make themselves feel more powerful. I’m sure they sincerely believe that their efforts are helping kids and cats, respectively. But I think they’re wrong.

A big part of the problem is that people have a natural tendency to over-estimate their own importance. Nobody takes a job he believes is a waste of time, and people self-select into professions they happen to think make a big difference in society. So TSA security screeners believe they’re making air travel safer, even when the evidence says they’re not. Patent attorneys believe they’re promoting innovation, even in industries where the evidence says otherwise. And adoption officials naturally believe that they play a vital role in ensuring kids get placed in loving homes.

This is in continuation of his previous article on the same subject, which is also worth review.

The concept in question, of course, is “Primum non nocere”, “First, do no harm”, which few employees of governments or similar Serve The Public Good organizations seem to have on their radars. The CPS rampage in San Angelo is a fairly obnoxious case in point. No one doubts that these do-gooders have the best of intentions, but, in the classic phrase, that road leads to Hell. The problem is not their intentions but their effects, and the arrogance that underlies the assumption that good intentions will necessarily lead to a good result.

Read it.

Prof Mary Beard admitted some of her colleagues were “a bit dubious” about the academic value of the history course, which ran for three years.

Oh, ya think?

This is what happens when universities go all hip-and-trendy.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

Well, duh. That’s what dictators do. I’m surprised he even went along with having elections.

Read it.

Let the whining begin.

Read it.

Read it.

But only for the Right Sort.

Suppose you are a government employee in California, authorized to conduct civil marriage ceremonies, and you object on moral or religious grounds to same-sex marriage. According to the plain logic of the California Supreme Court’s decision earlier this month, you are simply a bigot; the spring of your objection is irrational prejudice. There is no ground for tolerance for your views, precisely because your views impinge upon the fundamental rights of others. Recall that even someone (like Senator Obama) of the view that while marriage should remain an institution exclusive to a man and a woman, civil unions should be established for homosexuals, is also a narrow-minded bigot, again according to the force of the Court’s logic.

Read it.

Read it.

Thousands of protesters have besieged India’s capital New Delhi demanding their caste status be reduced to secure government benefits.

Incentives work.

Or sponge, as the case may be.

Read it.

Read it.

Susan Gurley, executive director of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, an advocacy group for the business-travel industry, tells us that the problem isn’t that Customs can now conduct these searches, but that Customs hasn’t made public its policies regarding how it handles the data it confiscates. For example, Gurley asks, how long will Customs keep a laptop? What happens to data once Customs is finished inspecting them? And how will Customs ensure that confidential information doesn’t leak out?

We tried for a week to get answers to those questions. The closest we came was an assurance from Hollinger that Customs and Border Protection handles all information as required by law.

Our pure-speculation translation: Customs is making this stuff up as it goes along.

Power without policy = arbitrary decisions by some carrot-IQ public employee. Hello, TSA.

Read it.

Nothing wrong with the Middle East that getting rid of the Arabs wouldn’t fix.

Read it.

It is also valuable to know that white people spend a significant portion of their time preparing for the moment when they will be offended.  They read magazines, books, and watch documentaries all in hopes that one day they will encounter a person who will say something offensive.  When this happens, they can leap into action with quotes, statistics, and historical examples.  Once they have finished lecturing another white person about how it’s wrong to use the term “black” instead of “African-American,” they can sit back and relax in the knowledge that they have made a difference.

Read it.

Probably Global Warming. I blame George Bush.

Read it.

You gotta love Australians.

Read it.

Read it.

Now, this sounds like a fantastic idea; put one of the most virulent hate groups operating openly in the US in charge of fighting crime in Miami….

The fact that they aren’t real Muslims isn’t that much of a comfort.

Read it.

Do it ooouuuurrrr way,

Do it our way;

Do it oooouuuurrrr way,

With Shari’a….

Read it.

If you get an outfit, you can be a terrorist too. (Or at least pretend — without having to go to the trouble of, like, maybe blowing yourself up or breaking a nail or, you know, something gross like that.)

Read it.

No doubt PETA is on the case.

Read it.

Can you think of a bigger waste of taxpayer money in a city where the crime and the quality of the schools would suggest better ways to spend those resources?

Run by Democrats, of course, like most urban behavioral sinks.

Read it.

Your future under Islam. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Read it.

I favor a series of exams ending in a cage match. But that’s me.

Read it.

Oh, I SO want one of these.

Now, if they only have hard points for missiles….

Read it.

Newsflash 1: Some people aren’t gonna like you.

Newsflash 2: That’s okay.

And that’s the truest word you’ll see today.

Read it.

The reason the system works so well is that it puts decisions in the hands of patients and doctors rather than of government bureaucrats and insurers. The state’s role is to provide a safety net for the few people unable to save enough to pay their way, to subsidize public hospitals, and to fund preventative health campaigns.

How weird is that?

Read it.

Rainbow Warrior, here we come….

Read it.

A footloose hippopotamus which has been tracked down the South African coast for months has fascinated locals by surfing in the waves.

Read it.

Funny how even governments that do everything they can to interfere with property rights among their subjects seem to be at the front of the line to claim such rights for themselves.