Read it.

That will cause a lot of buzz.

Yuck, yuck, yuck….

Read it.

And he’s going to need it.

(Twelve wheels! No waiting!)

Read it.

But Mugabe may not be Africa’s worst. That prize arguably goes to Teodoro Obiang, the ruler of Equatorial Guinea whose life seems a parody of the dictator genre. Years of violent apprenticeship in a genocidal regime led by a crazy uncle? Check. Power grab in a coup against the murderous uncle? Check. Execution of now-deposed uncle by firing squad? Check. Proclamation of self as “the liberator” of the nation? Check. Govern for decades in a way that prompts human rights groups to accuse your regime of murder, torture, and corruption? Check, check, and check.

Somebody in Slate criticizing black foreigners. Hell has officially frozen over.

But the agenda here is quite clear. In order to salve their consciences from decades of trumpeting how much better Mugabe was than the previous {insert string of leftoid swearwords here] “white” regime he replaced, it is now necessary to point out that, relatively speaking, he’s not so bad. And they’re all about “relatively speaking”.

Read it.

Note that it didn’t become a problem for the leftoid thumb-suckers at Slate until it started to be used against their Golden Child, Barack Hussein Obama. You will search in vain for criticism from anybody at Slate or their ilk about such tedious phrases as “Bushitler”, for example, or that perennial surrendernik dingleberry “quagmire”. And don’t get me started on the intellectual vapidity of “No blood for oil”.

Read it.

Remember how much fun the future used to be? Everyone trim and twinkle-toed in their one-piece jumpsuits with plenty of robots to do the work then mix the cocktails. And yet, despite the decades of excitement, the promised robot epoch remains mostly out of reach.

One of the key problems with our health care system is rising cost, and a central component of that is the requirement for highly-trained human labor. We haven’t benefited from the cost-cutting effects of significant automation. That may be changing — and it can’t come too soon.

The leftoid thumb-suckers at Slate of course see this as a bad thing.

But the advent of robot surgery signals a shift in the balance of power. Now the nerds, who previously had been content sending rockets to Mars, have seized control of that most sacred prize, the human being. Our future suddenly is in their heartless hands.

All part of the eternal campaign to cancel the Industrial Revolution….

Read it.

Is there any convincing evidence that actual Latino voters care as much about illegal immigrant legalization as Latino elected offiicials (or the journalists who cover them)?

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Sen. Webb is expected to travel on a tax-payer funded junket to Southeast Asia.  He  wants both his wife and his 18 month old child to accompany him without having to pay reimbursement to the government.  Unfortunately, according to a March 9, 2007, letter from Senators Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), while spouses are permitted to go with the Senator, “relatives of Senators (other than spouses) will not be permitted to travel with Senate delegations.”

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As George Washington knew from the get-go, the slow pace and individualist nature of the Senate would drive the more action-oriented House of Representatives batty. And it has, regularly and consistently. One of the most battle-tested anecdotes, which I first heard in the 1970s from former Representative Al Swift (D-WA), is about the freshman House member who refers to a member of the other party as “the enemy.” A more senior colleague says, “No, he is just a part of the opposition. The Senate is the enemy.”

Read it.

There was a remarkable exchange on the floor of the Senate this past Thursday between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. It offers pretty stunning evidence of how personally petty Reid is, as well as his penchant for defining “partisanship” as anything that keeps him from getting his way.

Read it.

In the late 1980s, before international experts arrived to tell us we had it all “wrong,” we in Uganda devised a practical campaign to prevent the spread of HIV. We recognized that population-wide AIDS epidemics in Africa were driven by people having sex with more than one regular partner. Therefore, we urged people to be faithful. Our campaign was called ABC (Abstain, or Be Faithful, or use Condoms), but our main message was: Stick to one partner. We promoted condoms only as a last resort.

Because we knew what to do in our country, we succeeded. The proportion of Ugandans infected with HIV plunged from 21 percent in 1991 to 6 percent in 2002. But international AIDS experts who came to Uganda said we were wrong to try to limit people’s sexual freedom. Worse, they had the financial power to force their casual-sex agendas upon us.

PEPFAR calls for Western experts to work as equal partners with African leaders on AIDS prevention. But as co-chair of Uganda’s National AIDS-Prevention Committee, I have seen this process sabotaged. Repeatedly, our 25-member prevention committee put faithfulness and abstinence into the National Strategic Plan that guides how PEPFAR money for our country will be spent. Repeatedly, foreign advisers erased our recommendations. When the document draft was published, fidelity and abstinence were missing.

Steve Sailer ruminates on some inconvenient truth.

Have you noticed that whenever some writer uses the words “vibrant” or “vibrancy” he is almost guaranteed to be yanking your chain? It’s just like how for so many years the phrase “in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate” always preceded utter bilge.

Whenever I read about “vibrant immigrant neighborhoods,” I wonder exactly which ones has the writer has been to, if any. Come to the vast immigrant neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley and check out the vibrancy: there isn’t any. They’re boring, tacky, and low-brow. There’s no culture beyond the video store. It was like that before, too, but 35 years ago we expected the place to improve a little with time, not regress.

Read it.

Not something I’d care to do.

Megan McArdle runs the numbers on the “universal childcare” fantasy.

The basic argument is that we should have highly skilled, quality childcare available for every child under the age of five in America. We should ensure this by paying a high wage and good benefits to those workers.

Let’s unpack this a little.

Turns out that, as with many popular socialist programs, we can’t afford it. But wait, there’s more.

There is something truly odd to me about highly educated people who simultaneously believe that they have something better to do than employ their degree in singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” seventy times a day, and also that there should be a large supply of bright, educated people who choose to do just that.

Read it.

Well, perhaps the Church of England will become a family business — right when the customers seem to be leaving in droves.

Read it.

The New York Times is shockd, shocked I tell you, that populations are plunging in Europe.

Gee, if they’d read Mark Steyn’s book, they’d know all about it.

But then, of course, they might be hauled into a Canadian kangaroo-court and accused of being Islamophobic.

You can see where they wouldn’t want to take that risk. What would their friends say?

Read it.

Well, that’s how the Anglicans got their start in the first place, after all, so they ought to be used to it.

That sputtering sound you hear is 1 billion Roman Catholics trying really really hard not to laugh.

It’s like watching a snowman melt in the sun.

Read it.

Yeah, they’ll be able to do that for about 4 hours. Then the U.S. Navy turns their piss-ant maritime force into scrap, and the Air Force does the same with anything Iranian that flies — not to mention their only refinery that can produce gasoline, and pretty soon they all start walking

I rather hope they try it. Could prove amusing. And our guys need the practice.

Read it.

Read it.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Read it.

Ajmi was released from Guantanamo Bay and was searching for “a way to reconnect with the jihad.” He claimed he was tortured while at Guantanamo Bay.

Thirteen Iraqi soldiers were killed and 42 were wounded after Ajmi drove an armored truck packed an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 pounds of explosives through the gate of the outpost and detonated in a spot between the three main buildings of the compound. The blast destroyed the facades of the three buildings, including the building housing the battalion headquarters.

Sounds like they didn’t torture him enough.

Read it.

After all, how can a society that’s moving to give a man the right to marry another man then refuse a man the right to marry two women?

Give way on gay marriage, you must give way on polygamy. In both cases it’s about consenting adults, right?

If I couldn’t be an American, I’d want to be an Australian.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

But the funny thing is, Bailyn’s long list of about a dozen or more things the Anti-Federalists warned would happen if the Constitution were ratified … they have all happened. They didn’t all happen right away. Many took until the Civil War, or the New Deal, or the Warren Court, or whatever. Still, when it comes to making long-run accurate predictions, the despised Anti-Federalists were right and the sainted Federalists were wrong.

Read it.

Gotta love those Kiwis, too.

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The Washington Post, voice of the Overclass, dislikes handguns. Why? Because handguns empower the individual citizen. The Overclass can afford to hire bodyguards, and don’t like individual citizens with the power to resist tyranny.

The right to buy weapons is the right to be free. The Overclass don’t want you to be free. It’s just that simple.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

Always knew that regressives were genetically defective — nobody could choose to be that much of a fool.

Read it.

Kung-fu pander?

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Boy, those South Africans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

Read it.

Read it.

Mr Giscard d’Estaing told the Irish Times that Ireland’s referendum rejection would not kill the Treaty, despite a legal requirement of unanimity from all the EU’s 27 member states.

“We are evolving towards majority voting because if we stay with unanimity, we will do nothing,” he said.

Forget all of this democracy nonsense. We will decide what’s best for the people.

Megan McArdle brings up a very good point.

I’m hardly the first person to make this observation, but I don’t know why it isn’t noted more often: guns are the only weapon that equalizes strength between attacker and attacked. It’s the only time when men’s greater speed, strength, and longer reach make no difference; if you pull the trigger first, you win.

Read it.

There is an inverse side to all this dithering: the rush to resolve gargantuan problems that do not exist: global warming, institutional racism, “Islamophobia,” American military overreach, etc. Hanson is right. Action brings risks. Perhaps the hand-wringers figure that treating a non-problem involves no risk. If you multiply something by zero, after all, you end up with zero. So: by applying aggressive policies to challenges that don’t yet exist, they once again feel safely ineffectual. This is a mad type of preemption.

Megan McArdle adds some righteous common sense to the gun debate.

Men like to kill themselves with guns. (This is not culture-specific; women tend to choose poison everywhere, presumably because of some deep fear of disfigurement). Gun suicides tend to be successful. But this does not mean that if you took away the guns, people wouldn’t commit suicide. There are many other near-surefire ways of killing yourself, like jumping off a high bridge, gassing yourself with carbon monoxide, driving your car at high speed into a piling, hanging yourself, etc. Think of it this way: most people who choose to wear high heels are women. That doesn’t mean that if I threw out my Manolos, I would turn into a man.

Read it.

Women of the world wait with bated breath.

Read it.

Well, duh.

“Donate sperm = Get sued for child support some time in the next twenty years, and you can never predict when”

Read it.

Free markets work every time they’re tried.

George Will nails it.

The semiconductor industry’s problem is entangled with a subject about which the loquacious presidential candidates are reluctant to talk — immigration, specifically that of highly educated people. Concerning whom, U.S. policy should be: A nation cannot have too many such people, so send us your PhDs yearning to be free.

Instead, the majority of our immigrants are semi-literate fruit-pickers and grass-mowers. What a world.

David Broder is an idiot. Proof:

Meanwhile, they have paid much less attention to what may well be a larger problem: the way that district lines are drawn to create safe seats for one party or the other, in effect denying voters any choice of representation.

The point of representation is not choice; the point is representation. “Safe seat” means that voters like the guy currently in place and will vote for him forever. That’s what representation is all about. If the sitter in a safe seat didn’t please the overwhelming majority of the voters, it woudn’t be a safe seat. Drawing lines to create safe seats means that there are fewer losers (people who didn’t get the representative they prefer) in each election than in so-called “competitive” seats. “Gerrymandering” makes democracy work better.

But journalists (and others in the Brahmin class) don’t want democracy to work better, they want exciting election contests that generate news (and, in the case of columnists, provide chin-stroke fodder). And they have the typical Brahmin arrogance that thinks everybody must want the same things they do. (“But how could Nixon win? I don’t know anybody who voted for him!”) They are mentally incapable of realizing that “safe seats” are a feature, not a bug.

Read it.

Powell, Hagel and lesser-known Obamacons harbor no animosity toward McCain. Nor do they show much affection for the rigidly liberal Obama. The Obamacon syndrome is based on hostility to Bush and his administration and on revulsion over today’s Republican Party. The danger for McCain is that desire for a therapeutic electoral bloodbath could get out of control.

Not that any of these guys have ever done anything distinctively “Republican”. So they ought to love John McCain, who is exactly the same kind of RINO.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Read it.

Guess politics trumps Christianity these days.

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Read it.

Good luck to ’em, I say.

Read it.

British soldiers serving in Afghanistan have recovered weapons taken from the bodies of their Victorian forebears.

Rare Martini-Henry rifles lost in the bloody defeat at Maiwand in July 1880 have been retrieved 128 years later by troops fighting the Taliban and al-Qa’ida in Helmand province.

Read it.

Note that she isn’t whining about it as some would do.

Read it.

Some people have entirely too much time on their hands.

Read it.

I wonder what “Star Wars” is in Mandarin….

Read it.

Next time somebody says, “It wouldn’t kill you to lose some weight”, you’ll know what to say.

Let this be a lesson to us all.