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Well, at least they’re not burning it for fuel.

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The pictures are especially evocative, although Ernst Roehm’s boys were snappier dressers.

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And look at the map. An excellent introduction to what’s going on there, and why we ought to stay out.

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The Overclass wishes that everybody else would just shut up.

Rather than call for government regulation of technology itself, perhaps the best way to limit the avalanche is to make the technologies that overproduce information more expensive and less widespread. It could be done via a progressive energy tax designed to keep energy prices at a consistently high level (while providing assistance to lower- and middle-income Americans).

Put the government in charge of information. What a novel idea.

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Yeah, but you’d still be living in Dubai. Put it in New Jersey and then we can talk.

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Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

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The team, Will Power Fitness, has an 8-0 record thanks in large part to pitcher Jericho Scott, the New Haven Register reports. His pitching is so fast and accurate, the Liga Juvenil De Baseball De New Haven asked the team’s coach, Wilfred Vidro, to replace him so he wouldn’t frighten other players.

This is how sad modern America has become.

“The spirit of the league was community, family, well-being, nurturing,” Peter Noble, the league’s attorney, told the Register. “It’s an extended family and it’s been disrupted.”

Sounds as if they ought to cut to the chase and just sit around singing Kumbaya. It would certainly save on equipment.

Mickey Kaus has the dirt.

Perhaps Democrats can learn from experience after all. That would be amazing.

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Words fail me.

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They don’t make ’em like that any more. Take a look.

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The Media Sectors and their to-date 2008 Political Investments

* Computer & Internet – $24,255,207 (62% to Democrats)
* Books, Magazines & Papers – $12,187,548 (78% to Democrats)
* Computer Software – $8,922,053 (61% to Democrats)
* Motion Picture Industry – $7,523,136 (88% to Democrats)
* Cable & Satellite TV – $6,303,046 (63% to Democrats)
* Music Recording Industry – $2,983,755 (79% to Democrats)
* Television Production and Distribution – $2,322,587 (86% to Democrats)

Quite frankly, I’m surprised that the percentages are that low.

TheFatBigot shines a harsh light on the way the Ruling Class deal with “poverty”.

It makes me cringe to hear poverty defined by reference to a given percentage of average national income because there is no principle to it. The average and percentage used are just random choices and can be selected to suit political preconceptions. If we are to find a principle by which to define poverty we have to ask what poverty means in practice and extrapolate a principle from that. Logically there is a prior step, which is to decide whether we mean relative or absolute poverty and I have no doubt that we can only ever talk of relative poverty because it would be to abuse language to define someone with a weekly income of £50 in Britain as not being in poverty simply because such an income would provide very nicely for all their needs if they lived in a mud hut in deepest Africa.

This guy runs a curmudgeonly and well-thought blog. I highly recommend it.

Read it.

Of all the countries in the world whose spies I fear, Israel isn’t one of them. Considering the number of times Israel has been bitch-slapped by its nominal allies, I don’t blame them for having spies in the United States. Hell, if I had classified information and somebody from the Israeli government wanted a copy, I’d probably give it to them; it’s not as if they’re going to use it to harm the United States — the United States government, perhaps, but that’s a different thing entirely.

Read it.

This is actually a quite useful device. Those who exercise are well aware that it’s Less Like Work if you’ve got something to pace with, be it a friend (or sadistic drill instructor) running beside you or some appropriate music.

Nancy Kress introduces a fascinating subject that is undeservedly off the radar of most people. I, for one, intend to poke into it much more heavily, and I would encourage you to do the same.

The surprise comes in Epigenesis III. Some traits acquired in mothers as a result of how their patterns of cells react to environmental toxins seems to be inherited by their offspring. This sounds almost LaMarckian, but there is proof from experiments with agouti mice. Mice with identical genomes (they were clones) were exposed to high concentrations of BPA (that’s the same toxin being yelled about with regard to plastic water bottles). The offspring of those so exposed were a different color (yellow rather than brown) and gained weight easily. This might have been construed as damage to their genomes — except that the new offspring were then not exposed to any more BPA, and still their offspring showed heritable patterns of color and weight gain, presumably as a result of the passing on of Gen II’s epigenetic patterns. And the abnormalities were reversed by feeding the mice diets high in soy, indicating they were not set-in-stone genetic instructions.

And read Nancy’s books too, of course. I guarantee you’ll like them. If you can read Beggars in Spain and not immediately devour every piece of her writing you can get your hands on, well, the angels will weep for you. She’s got a new one out, Dogs, the delivery of which I am awaiting with sweaty palms.

Read it.

One expects to find such writing in Human Events, but hardly in Slate. Guess the left and the right aren’t so far apart as one might think.

Read it. I dare you.

For those unfamiliar with Slate magazine and how it contributes heavily to the disintegration of American civilization, this will serve as an excellent exemplar.

Thomas Sowell says what needs to be said.

While this trend of self-dramatization is most visible in sports, it extends well beyond athletes. Parents give their children off-the-wall names. “Mary” has long since lost its place as the perennially most popular name for girls. There is a high turnover in what names are hot and which ones are not. Apparently everyone has to try to outdo everyone else, even in naming children.

Blackwater shows what the government could do if used modern business methods.

Steve Sailer does the Olympics — and nobody does it better.

Warning: Do not be drinking when you read this.

Read it.

Used to be that European navies, especially the British, kept piracy suppressed. Apparently that’s not an option any more.

“Somalia has no central government. We are worried that more may join the pirates to hijack ships because it’s very lucrative and there is no deterrent,” said Noel Choong of the International Maritime Bureau.

And these pirates, being Somalis, are probably … what? Presbyterians? Methodists?

“The United Nations is the only agency that can stop this menace,” said Mr Choong.

Oh, right. They’ve been such an effective force for peace in the past. Ask the corpses in Rwanda and Bosnia.

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We have the technology.

TheFatBigot takes a look at economic stratification.

With food and fuel prices rising by huge amounts we will hear much over the coming months about poverty and it will all concentrate on money. It is quite right that money should feature high on the poverty agenda because most definitions of poverty look at nothing else. My intention is to address the monetary side of poverty in a series of ramblings over the next few weeks, but today I want to challenge the concept that a lack of money is an adequate definition of poverty.

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I find this deeply disturbing. I find the headline even more disturbing.

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Yeah, we really want more of those people in the United States.

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Robert Spencer reports that “the MSA of the University of Southern California became a focal point of this effort [to repudiate the genocidal hadith about Muslims killing Jews to bring on the end times] because it hosts a major online hadith collection here, which of course included the genocidal hadith. When this was brought to the attention of USA Provost, C. L. Max Nikias, he declared that ‘the passage cited is truly despicable…The passage in the Hadith that you brought to our attention violates the USC Principles of Community, and it has no place on a USC website.’ Said Nikias: ‘I have ordered that the passage be removed.’ You can see a pdf of his letter here. The USC MSA complied.”

There’s respect for scholarship.

That Hadith may have been taken off the website of the Muslim Students Association. But, like hundreds of similar Hadith, it has not been removed from the minds of Muslims. It has not been removed from the collections of the most authoritative muhaddithin or from this list of those hadiths that are often labeled as among the most “authentic.”

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As if Shumer really cares what California thinks.

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Patent system? Broken.

Microsoft? Evil.

Arnold Kling takes a hard look at an ugly aspect of our society.

How does the liberal elite view the American military? It seems to me that they view the military as a group of basically evil men, inclined to torture and commit war crimes. It would be better if we could do without a military, but they are ok as long as a good guy from the liberal elite is President, selecting their missions and controlling their excesses.

How does the liberal elite view entrepreneurs and business leaders? It seems to me that they view capitalists as a group of basically evil men, inclined to exploit workers and rip off consumers. It would be better if we could do without capitalists, but they are ok as long as good guys from the liberal elite are in power, delegating tasks to markets only when appropriate and regulating capitalists to control their excesses.

Read it.

Don’t be afraid to expose your assumptions.

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Italian food is proof positive that God loves us and wants us to enjoy ourselves.

Believe it.

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It’s practically impossible to get any privacy these days.

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Swaziland is Africa’s last remaining absolute monarchy and has been under a state of emergency since 1973. Public criticism of the monarchy is extremely rare, but a journey to Europe and the Middle East by eight of King Mswati III’s 13 wives, their children, maids and bodyguards, in a specially chartered aeroplane, has provoked outrage.

And yet if he were Muslim nobody would blink an eye.

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Ah, they don’t make ’em like that any more.

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Well, that’s one way to solve the problem of too many old people.

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Let that be a lesson to us all. Animals are not your friends.

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Earlier this year, in response to yet another editorial somewhere where someone insisted that if something has a price of zero, it means that people don’t think it has any value, we pointed out that price and value are two different things. Price isn’t determined by value — it’s determined by the intersection of supply and demand. Value plays into that, by determining what the demand part is.

An excellent discussion of a distinction not commonly understood by the ignorati.

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We have the technology.

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Of course, a government-run health care system is a fine thing. Just ask dental patients in Britain.

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Aw, mom…..

Steve Sailer takes on modern sports.

One contributor to the unwieldy giganticism of the Olympics is the perceived need to hold a women’s event for every men’s event, no matter how unpopular the sport is with women, or, in many cases, with both sexes. For example, modern pentathalon (in which you pretend to be a courier during the Napoleonic Wars and swim, horseback ride, run, shoot, and fence your way to delivering your secret message — okay, in theory, it sounds pretty cool, but in practice, nobody cares) hasn’t been all that big since George S. Patton finished fifth in it back in 1912, but, nonetheless, the Olympics added women’s modern pentathalon in 2000.

Read it.

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

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Harold Ickes is the prototypical insider, a career political operative who knows as much about how Washington works as anyone.

Just don’t ask the former Clinton White House official and Democratic superdelegate what ward he lives in.

The presence of these high-profile figures simultaneously excites and frustrates the local delegation, made up of city officials and activists, including Evans, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and D.C. Democratic Party Chairman Anita Bonds. As it does every four years, the D.C. delegation will use the convention to renew a public push for congressional voting rights. But even though the big shots command media attention and enjoy outsize influence that could help the District’s cause, most aren’t planning to spend much time with the locals or join them at a voting rights rally at Denver’s U.S. Mint.

Read it.

The Philippine peace process was thrown into disarray Wednesday, with the government saying a proposed deal with separatist Muslim rebels must be renegotiated after the guerrillas shot or hacked 37 people to death Monday.

Oh, ya think?

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That’s a million in modern money, of course, which is worth rather less then it was back then.

Steve Sailer isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions.

Read it.

There is no difference in principle between how government should operate and how a cricket club committee should operate. Government exists to arrange the things that need to be arranged and to provide the facilities which are necessary for the people to be able to live their lives to best advantage. In the same way that cricket club members must pay for club facilities through their annual subscriptions and match fees so the people must pay for government organised facilities through tax. And in the same way that interference by the club committee with the actual playing of the game would be counterproductive, so is undue interference by government in the way we live our lives. What makes a cricket player tick is having a good ground to play on, a team to play with and the opportunity to use his own skills as well as he can.

Excellently put.

Read it.