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Every now and then, the Brahmin media organs will surprise you.

As I began to finish the reporting for this article, I mentioned to an Obama aide that I was interested in the different ways that Obama presents himself to black and white audiences. The aide hit the roof over this comment, which he claimed was racially divisive, and soon I received a call from Obama’s “African-American outreach coordinator,” who apparently clarifies race issues for reporters when they are perceived to have strayed. “I appreciate what you’re saying,” said Corey Ealons, “but I think it’s dangerous, quite frankly.” He thought for a moment. “The spirit of this campaign is about bringing people together and focusing on the things that are similar about us as opposed to the things that make it different,” he said. “Barack is one of the best political communicators in our history. If you’re somehow saying that he can’t be the same person with all people, that’s certainly not the case.” He paused. “Barack Obama is Barack Obama,” he said.

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But apparently some, who realize that it’s a poison pill designed to looks like and accomplishment but stymie true reform, have no problem with it.

You’d never know that from the headline, of course.

Agenda? What’s that?

Jerry Pournelle also has some things to say about statistics and systems analysis.

American have got to understand that moving money around in circles is not actually production; that most “services” in the service economy aren’t actually need or producing much — did we need 100,000 sales agents for high risk mortgages that put illegal immigrants into $400,000 houses on interest only loans? Sure there are real service jobs, like mechanics and plumbers, who take things that don’t work and make things that do work, but that’s not the same as selling bad mortgages to people who shouldn’t be borrowing money in the first place.

Lileks is in fine form today.

The term “elitist” does not mean a smart person with an area of expertise. It means a person who occupies a narrow stratum of society, usually academic – although people in think-tanks who view the world through steepled fingers qualify as well – whose Olympian perspective is usually predicated on a set of assumptions about people tinged with equal parts indulgent condescension and faint amusement, as an anthropologist might bring to the study of a Cargo Cult. It also confuses proximity to the Washington Monument with access to truth.

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Well – there it is.

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This looks like it will crawl down off the dresser at midnight and go after your enemies.

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Here’s the scary part:

Officials checked the maps but found no record of the mystery village surrounded by trees and bushes and set about removing it as it did not adhere to the planning rules.

It’s out in the middle of nowhere, on private property, and they were going to remove it “as it did not adhere to planning rules.” When did Britain turn into the Soviet Union?

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We have the technology.

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We have the technology.

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Wilson writes: “Advice to anyone about to travel to Thailand is simple. Before you go, sort out a decent photo of yourself, preferably taken at a party smiling and celebrating the joy of being alive, because the newspapers and TV news bulletins will want something to accompany the article about your tragic death.”

My kind of guidebook.

And about Machu Picchu, he writes: “It’s a 6,000-mile journey – 12 thrombotic hours on a plane followed by a bladder-bursting seven-hour bus ride – to see something you could watch Michael Palin climbing up on TV – all in the company of the 400,000 intensely irritating gap-year students who think it’s totally awesome, dude.”

Preach it, brother.

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The woman who masterminded the biggest embezzlement in D.C. government history inherited a scam running in the city’s tax office and relied on a culture of mismanagement and corruption so entrenched that she escaped notice for almost 20 years.

You’d never know from reading this Washington Post article that she’s a Democrat. Indeed, since the DC government has been controlled by Democrats ever since there was a DC government, guess who’s responsible for the “culture of mismanagement and corruption” we’re tut-tutting about here?

Whether a Republican administration would have been treated so politely is left as an exercise for the reader.

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And how much of that was pork?

“We’re not trying to give incentives to drill, we’re giving incentives to invest in renewables and natural gas that will take us where we need to go,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) told reporters before the vote.

Well, that answers my question.

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The Environmental Protection Agency has done little to curb the export of discarded electronic products containing hazardous waste, much of which ends up in poorly regulated countries and harms the environment and public health, the Government Accountability Office concluded in a report being released today.

And how is that any business of the American EPA? Other countries would appear to be, oh, I don’t know, OUTSIDE OF THEIR JURISDICTION.

I’d heard tell that they’d changed what “GAO” stands for, but I didn’t realize that they’d changed it to “Government Asininity Office”.

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Mostly resume-building on the part of politicians — they don’t plan to be mayors and city councilmen forever, you know.

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They need a mascot, like the gekko with the Aussie accent.

I know: A slug that talks like Peter Lorre. That always says “government” to me.

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Should we encourage female Muslims to blow themselves up, prefereably before they have a chance to reproduce? Think of it as evolution in action.

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We’ve been asking for months why the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) treaty is being negotiated in near total secrecy, allowing the entertainment industry to effectively rewrite international copyright law in substantial ways with almost no legislative review. Basically, various trade representatives, together with industry insiders, have been crafting ACTA to their own liking, with a plan to push it through for approval, claiming it’s a trade agreement that shouldn’t involve any legislative overview. It’s an incredibly one-sided affair, from what’s been leaked so far, and would substantially change copyright law around the globe in favor of protecting the entertainment industry’s business model.

But, of course, what we need is more government regulation. That has really worked so well for us in the past.

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Your tax dollars at work.

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I’d be more impressed if Wall Street ordered a wide Pelosi probe. Considering what they cost they American taxapayer, respectively, Congress is a better target for such a probe. I’d love to see big spenders like Robert Byrd and Ted Stevens lose their “golden parachutes” and do the perp walk into the slammer.

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A revolt led by terrified passengers forced a German airline to change their plane after it twice had to abort take off.

Now that’s comedy.

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From the perspective of each individual taxpayer or voter, and from the perspective of each elected official, what government spends is unconnected with what government receives as tax revenues, and what Uncle Sam receives as tax revenues is unconnected with what it spends.

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Thank God for the U.N. — don’t know what we’d do without them to control these international problems.

Megan McArdle joins the happy chorus.

One of my commenters blames Bush for gutting the predatory lending laws at the state level.  A wicked pundit would note that this is a project near and dear to the heart of one Senator Joe Biden, (D-MBNA).  A less divisive voice would point out that predatory lending laws are aimed mostly at payday loans and credit cards, not housing loans.  The fraud problems in the housing market seem mostly to have been perpetuated by mortgage brokers, who are still regulated at the state level.  The worst problems are in Democratic-dominated California.

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Interesting points:

1. All liberals consider themselves to be “independent voters”, whereas non-liberals tell you what they are; so when you hear someone describe himself as an “independent voter”, you can pretty much depend on his being a liberal.
2. Liberals are the sort of people who vote for somebody as the result of a bet; voting is equivalent in value to shaving your head or doing something mildly embarrassing in public.
3. Honest liberals pay up when the unlikely thing they bet against actually happens. Treasure them; there aren’t that many honest liberals.
4. “…useful and unbiased information about which candidate has the best plans for the economy.” means a survey in which 48% of the respondents are Democrats while only 17% are Republicans. Yeah, that’s “useful and unbiased” all right. And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

Read it.

An excellent question, backed by a very common-sensical analysis.

The starting point must be to investigate why this bank went under. That is fairly simple, it had obligations to pay money but no money with which to pay them. Although it is dressed up as a mysterious business comprehensible only to the brilliant, investment banking is pretty straight forward. Customers hand over a lump of cash and and the bank invests it hither and yon in the hope that a profit will ensue. The customer receives some of the profit and the bank receives its cut. Everyone is happy and the world continues to turn. Of course they won’t attract many customers by saying “hand over cash and we’ll try to make it grow”, so they offer incentives such as a minimum rate of return over a given period. The customer must leave his money with them for a minimum time. At the end of that period the banks must not only make sufficient profit to be able to pay the customer his guaranteed interest they also have to repay the capital sum if the customer demands it. Some do and others decide to leave it in place for another year or two.

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Funny how every time “progressives” come up with another bright idea, it turns out to be a disaster.

Christopher Hitchens gets the question right but the answer wrong — as usual.

Name a Muslim country that isn’t a problem, there’s the hard part.

Lileks limns the looney Left.

I don’t know if anyone’s stated the obvious yet, but this might be the first time people have become unhinged in advance over a vice-presidential candidate. Not to say some aren’t painting McCain as something the devil blurted out in a distracted moment during his daily conference call with Cheney, but a Veep? It took a while for people to believe that Cheney commissioned private snuff films with runaways dressed up to resemble a portion of the Bill of Rights, but Palin is She-Wolf of the Tundra right off the bat. And god help us she can use email, which means she will control the government. The most Spy ever did with Quayle was stick him in a dunce hat. By the time we reach the election Oliphant will probably draw Palin sodomizing by an oil derrick with guns for arms. I have to confess: I think Palin is an interesting politician, but the people she’s driving batty are much more fascinating.

I don’t see why people are so surprised by Al Qaeda, considering the amount of irrational hate that our native “progressive” fringe is ready, willing, and able to spew — and they don’t even have the fragile excuse that God wants them to.

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Before you begin hanging around with white people, you should know that all white humor comes from three sources: The Simpsons, Monty Python, and The Onion.

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These kids today….

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Well, they see how well it works for the Muslims….

Steve Sailer is having a great time.

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Try to find a cat who would do that.

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And the educational system is staffed by … Democrats!

The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.

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We have the technology.

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Of course, a legislator doesn’t need to know what’s in the tax code, any more than the girl at McDonald’s needs to know what in an Egg McMuffin. Take  the money, order up, next customer.

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Yup, grinding their faces into the cream cheese, we are.

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Let’s face it, no one gazing at the crowd of the Republican convention in St. Paul last week would have mistaken it for Sam and Becky Lebowitz’s grandson’s bar mitzvah party.

Read it.

Left-wing feminists have a hard time dealing with strong, successful conservative women in politics such as Margaret Thatcher. Sarah Palin seems to have truly unhinged more than a few, eliciting a stream of vicious, often misogynist invective.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, takes a break to review a book.

Cat owner? Likely Democrat. NRA member? Probably Republican. Mailings and phone calls can then be targeted more accurately. Health professionals, especially when treating older patients, are now monitoring such things as weight, body temperature and pulse by having a computer follow data streams from sensors on clothing or even from sensor-laden “magic carpets” laid around the house. Disturbing patterns prompt the computer to signal a problem. The Numerati are taking over dating services, too. How do you find that special one in a million? By mining the data of the million. How do you improve your own chances of being found? By the same techniques that companies use to show up first in a Google inquiry — “search engine optimization,” now a flourishing industry.

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Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy in action.

Not to mention a good reason not to live in California.

Jerry Pournelle has some thoughts on the subject.

And it suddenly occurred to me. Here we were discussing what ought to be done for people we have never met, do not hang out with, and generally don’t really understand. Here were three high IQ people talking about what ought to be done for low IQ people.  And: the ONLY people discussing what ought to be done with/about/for the low IQ people are high IQ types who do NOT KNOW ANY LOW IQ PEOPLE, do not hang out with them, and probably cannot remember when they last met a person of, say, IQ 85, much less had any extended conversation with them.

A British perspective.

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Boy, there’s a shocker.

People get paid for this. From tax money, i.e. your wallet. Take whatever action you think is appropriate.

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This point is stressed by project leader Professor Mark Spigelman, of University College London. ‘I don’t think we’ve got new diseases today; we have got variations of old diseases,’ he told The Observer.

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(Especially if you do something stupid and get a Darwin Award. But they don’t mention that in the article.)

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I’m taking bets on how long before some nutter decides that this is the fault of the U.S. in general and George Bush in particular.

What Would Barack Do?

Probably wring his hands and try to talk them to death.