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Only for rather loose definitions of “men”.

Retailers say men’s tights are not being sold as fetish garments, but as practical, comfortable and stylish everyday wear.

Of course.

And a few even claim that tights are the latest symbol of metrosexuality.

Now that I’m fully prepared to believe.

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Sure, why not? Although this will reinforce a lot of stereotypes about Germans….

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I guess Iraq is safer.

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Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

Steve Sailer gets really odd.

I got the first 31 in a row right for 620 grains of rice, so, morally speaking, I now get to go kick a cat or something.

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With what? They couldn’t do shit in eight years of war with Saddam’s Iraq, which we took apart like wet cardboard.

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Are you listenin’, New York Times? Iraq is a damned sight safer than the Bronx.

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I don’t care where he was born or where he lives, this guy has the soul of an American.

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How long before India comes apart? It ought to be about twelve different countries.

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They ought to be hunted down like dogs. Like dogs!

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I think that the funniest thing I ever heard was the Speaker of the House of Representatives (Jim Wright, I believe) adjourn the House “siny dye”.

Megan McArdle explains why it’s a pointless sham.

Any Pigovian Tax on energy is going to make those with lower incomes suffer the most, because those are the people who use the most energy relative to their incomes.  To the extent that we aim at making the tax distributively fair, we will make it ineffective, at which point we might as well just roll the thing into the income tax structure and forget about taxing energy.

As currently structured, then, the Obama plan seems unlikely to induce much change in relative prices, supply, or demand.  Mostly, what we’ll achieve is creating an expensive new administrative burden.  This will be a very expensive tax, in terms of the amount of administrative overhead and deadweight loss we endure for each dollar raised or ton of carbon kept out of the atmosphere.

Megan McArdle points out some of the dystopian aspects of modern society.

The internet has allowed the deviants to find each other, to construct a community with shared norms that tolerate, even celebrate, the pain of others.  And it cloaks them in sufficient anonymity to get by in the outside world.  If people knew what they had done, I doubt they’d survive two weeks–no one would sell them food, rent them shelter, or for that matter, permit them to merge into the exit lane.  But no one knows.

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Criminals who have allergies are out of luck, I guess.

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Darwin Award nominee.

Tim Blair is on the case.

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Social justice is a term that trips off the tongue of politicians when they are at their most earnest and their most evasive. “What can you do for me?” asks the man of the parliamentary candidate, the candidate looks him in the eye, lowers his voice and says in his most reassuring tone “I will bring you social justice.” Just two words act like Rennies after a vindaloo, all burning is negated and the hope of a good night’s sleep is increased. How can these words have that effect? The answer is simple, because they do not have an established meaning and, therefore, can be interpreted by the listener to mean anything he likes.

A reminder that the fight for the meaning of words is the most important fight there is.

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Most people think of clubs as recreational groups, but Laitin and Berman are using a more subtle definition. Clubs are groups that tend to be selective about their members. Unlike political parties and book-reading groups, which allow anyone to join, clubs make it difficult for people to sign up. And once admitted, members must make personal sacrifices to stay. In the case of an exclusive golf club, the sacrifice might involve paying sizable dues. In the case of some religious orders, would-be members might have to go through lengthy periods of initiation.

The “club model” of terrorism explains why cogs such as Hamdan stay loyal. Across all kinds of clubs, when members make sacrifices, they are much more likely to become intensely loyal to fellow members. Berman and Laitin think this is because the sacrifices that members make to join a club reduce their value outside the club. If you devote years to learning a religious text, that knowledge can give you social cachet within your club, but your effort counts for little outside the club.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

No mention of Summer Glau, though, so it’s seriously deficient.

Megan McArdle limns the self-serving hypocrisy of the anti-war movement.

The South posed no immediate military threat to the North; they wanted to leave the Union, not invade it. If you don’t think that, say, Saddam’s awful behavior posed a valid moral reason to invade*, then it’s hard to make an argument that we had a right to invade to end slavery. Even a prudential argument doesn’t work very well on this metric–we killed more confederates than Iraqis both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population, and the south was far more economically devastated by the war than Iraq will have been.

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Invaluable advice.

The concept of “sunk cost” and the need to eliminate it from decision-making is one of the most difficult, yet most necessary, concepts that accountants must learn.

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Yeah, well, they are Italians.

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“Planned Parenthood is a lying, racist organization,” said Alveda King, niece of civil rights icon Martin Luther King, adding that one of two abortions performed on her occurred at a Planned Parenthood clinic.

“Planned Parenthood says they provide health services to the black community,” said the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, founder of the Los Angeles-based Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny. “I ask, what is healthy about killing black children?”

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And that is the most valuable thing. Information that is not indexed might as well not exist.

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I’ve read uncountable fiction stories in which an alien race (typically either elves or elves with the serial numbers filed off) are incredibly long-lived but only infrequently have children, and the story invariably assumes that because of that children are very precious.

The recent demographic declines in civilized nations, along with the vocal Human Beings Suck and Cause All the World’s Problems movement, suggests a different scenario: The alien race is very long-lived and children are considered a nuisance to be avoided. Oh, wait, I guess they aren’t that alien after all….

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

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Markets work even when you don’t want them to: When everyone enforces the law, the law is most efficiently enforced.

I think I’ll call it “democracy”, a term whose original use seems to have faded away.

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One consequence of the relaxation of the laws relating to homosexual activity is that we have lost the previous meaning of “unnatural” acts. Indeed, were any newspaper today to describe George Michael’s historical deeds in America as “unnatural” it would be inundated with letters and emails condemning its antediluvian attitude. Homosexuality is no longer “unnatural”. Yet the word is still in the dictionary, it needs a new meaning.

As luck would have it, at almost the same time that George Michael’s closet was opened, so was a new definition of “unnatural”. Today it means “industrial”. I will not linger on the question whether we need to find a new use for “industrial” because my concentration is all on “unnatural”. And how convenient it is that I said concentration because that is the key to the new meaning of today’s mot du jour. I mean, of course, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Being astute people, you might observe that no one has suggested CO2 to be anything other than a naturally occurring gas and you would be right. It is a very clever sleight of hand, you see, we can recognise CO2 as a natural product while implying that some CO2 is unnatural because of the way it is produced.

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This looks very, very interesting.

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The End Times are here.

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Symptom and cause, rolled up into one tidy package.

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You want plastic? We got plastic.

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Like watching a snowman melt in the sun.

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Quick Checks for Violators Improve Officers’ Efficiency but Worry ACLU

Really — seems like anything that makes it easier to catch crooks worries the ACLU.

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The steel, glass and wood addition, called The Hub, is used by villagers for meetings, lectures and concerts and also contains a kitchen and a vestry.

I guess the competition for what church could best hide the fact that it was supposed to be a church.

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As you traverse your favored metropolis, the Dash Express anonymously transmits information about its location and speed to a central server. Every other Dash driver does the same. Using this data, Dash can paint a stunningly accurate picture of traffic patterns. Have you ever been stuck in a jam and wished there were some way to look two miles ahead to see whether things are still ugly? Dash essentially does that for you.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Let this be a lesson to us all.

Tim Blair offers an Australian perspective.

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