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America is aways reluctant to believe that there are hostile people in the world. It’s time to face reality and admit that there are people out there who don’t like us, who want to harm us, and who are working actively against us. The technical term for such people is “enemy”.

Donald Luskin points out that the “recession” exists only in the imaginations of those who would profit from your believing it.

But that doesn’t make any of it true. Things today just aren’t that bad. Sure, there are trouble spots in the economy, as the government takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and jitters about Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers, amply demonstrate. And unemployment figures are up a bit, too. None of this, however, is cause for depression — or exaggerated Depression comparisons.

In his corner, he has these things called “facts”.

Overall, the pessimists are up against an insurmountable reality: In the last reported quarter, the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent, adjusted for inflation. That’s virtually the same as the 3.4 percent average growth rate since — yes — the Great Depression.

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Another milestone on the road to Londonistan.

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Now that is clever.

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Jonathan Haidt is an anti-gun activist who thinks a poodle is his nephew. He is also a distinguished psychologist. Few people will be surprised by that juxtaposition. His orientation is of course Leftist and he accepts some of the convenient myths that Leftist psychologists cling to.

Haidt’s own thinking on gun control would seem to be an excellent example of how simplistic and deficient Leftist thinking is on moral issues. Conservatives look at the fact that gun control takes guns out of the hands of law-abiding people but not out of the hands of criminals and see that as a huge problem. Leftists seem to see that as no problem. To conservatives, anybody who ignores that problem seems to have a bit missing in his brain.

Tyler Cowan brings some economic literacy to the bailout debates. The Chattering Class, of course, would have you believe that it was a deregulated, laissez-fair, dog-eat-dog capitalism that caused the current series of crises — assuming that you aren’t paying attention to the fact that existing government regulations created or exacerbated most of them.

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Oooooh, “Texas billionaire”. Might as well just say “rich Nazi” and get it over with.

Of course, nothing is ever said about George Soros, New York billionaire (and actual foreigner), who bankrolls dozens of such groups to attack Republicans.

The resurgence on the right appears as though it will not go unanswered. The Service Employees International Union is set to unveil a multimillion-dollar television campaign on Monday, and other liberal and Democratic-aligned groups are rushing to establish financing for efforts over the final weeks of the campaign.

Note the implication that this is all an “answer” to the “resurgence on the right”. Hint: They were going to do that anyway:

In the spring, a coalition of liberal groups that included the AFL-CIO announced plans to spend $350 million on political activities during the 2008 campaign season, but they have been slow in coming together.

Not quite an “answer”, is it?

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I don’t recall there being any “investigative reporter” exposés of AlGore while he was Vice-President; and I rather suspect that they wouldn’t have received Pulitzer Prizes had there been any.

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Many people think that price is determined by historical cost.  Price is never, ever, determined by historical cost. Price is determined by supply and demand.  If supply or demand change then the price changes regardless of historical cost.  Last year’s fashions?  The price falls regardless of cost.  Chopped up dead sharks?  If demand is high, the price is high regardless of historical cost.  If the demand for gas were to suddenly fall, the price of gas would fall too, regardless of cost.  In the present situation the supply of gas has been reduced and the price has gone up.  Historical cost is always irrelevant.

In partcular, price of gas is determined, not by what it actually cost the supplier, but by what it will cost to replace it. There is thus no lag between a rise in the price of oil and a rise in the price of gasoline.

“Price gouging” is merely a tendentious term for “more than I want to pay”. That’s all it is — spin. if you fall for it, then you’re one of the stupid people who would vote for Hitler.

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They would be well advised not to get into a pissing contest with U.S. forces.

On the other hand, it would serve as a perfect excuse to go in and clean up the place.

In your corner, Barack.

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Fascism comes on little cat feet, wearing an artist’s beret and waving academic credentials.

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I’m glad to see they got the priority right.

I’d like to wrap this around a number of leftoids, starting with AlGore, with an admonishion to Just Chill.

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Well, I certainly hope so. But that assumes a degree of competence — and, shall we say, focus? — on the part of the American government that flies in the face of recent history.

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Who remembers Jack Kilby? And yet he is easily as important as Thomas Edison — or even Henry Ford.

Compare and contrast with Stephen King.

Try not to get too depressed.

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Neoteny appears to be the prevailing disease of our time.

Wendy Brown, of Green Bay, Wisconsin, looked old for the Jaguars cheerleaders’ squad but was timid and ‘had a high-school demeanour’, according to an employee of Ashwaubenon High School.

I won’t comment on people who are willing to believe that a 33-year-old woman is actually a 15-year-old girl.

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

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Let me know how that works. I have my doubts.

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Perhaps that explains the federal government.

Apparently Steven Brust doesn’t particularly like Aggies.

Well, I suppose they don’t particularly like him, either….

Don’t know who Steven Brust is? The angels will weep for you. Go to the bookstore and buy a copy of Jhereg. You’ll be glad you did.

Just because Brust’s a communist doesn’t mean he isn’t a great writer, sad to say.

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Well, I wouldn’t, but that’s me.

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Basically, Master Bladesmith Takamura will be partnering with Gordon Ramsay to produce, market and sell 1,000 high-end Chef’s knives.

Don’t ever say we don’t post useful stuff here.

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Whenever laws distort the market, politicians and their friends will get rich off of the situation. That’s as close to a universal truth as we have in human affairs.

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Wouldn’t mind having one of those.

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This is very silly. But we have the technology.

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The greater point is not the difficulties that Pakistan has in governing these areas — after all, Pakistan exists because the British were too cowardly to resist those who demanded a tribal, religion-based state of their own in 1947, so there’s a permanent contradiction here — but that these areas are government by hostes humani generis, enemies of mankind. Until the world wakes up to the fact that the problem is not individual Muslims but rather the totalitarian ideology of Islam itself, there will always be a problem.

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I could believe the 5th Amendment. I don’t believe the 4th.

This is an obviously stupid decision not based on legal principles or a rational reading of the 4th amendment but rather on the fantasies of people who wake up in the morning thinking that this is 1930s Germany. Unfortuantely those peopel are in control of the courts, and the rest of us have to suffer the consequences.

Cringely speaks some urgently-needed truth.

If your boss doesn’t understand your job enough to describe it in technical detail, that boss is in the wrong job.

If you are managing an IT shop and can’t write the code to render “hello world” in C, html, php, and pull “hello world” from a MySQL database using a perl script, then YOU are in the wrong job.

The essence of efficiency is doing only the parts that are absolutely needed and almost every shop has at least one project that everyone except the big boss knows is either pointless or hopeless. Cut it.

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Senior State Department officials recently talked about the successful disarmament of Libya’s nuclear and other weapons programs, but one of the most revealing aspects of the case did not come up: how U.S. officials found and removed Chinese-language nuclear warhead design documents in Libya.

Reminder: The Chinese are a Communist dictatorship. They are Not Our Friends.

One of the Pentagon’s newest advanced weapons systems reached a milestone this week when the Airborne Laser successfully carried out the first ground testing of a high-powered beam that could be used to shoot down missiles and perhaps aircraft in flight in the not-too-distant future.

I guess “Star Wars” is on its way to working after all.

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder. These are the people who train the people who populate legislatures and the courts.

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Well, that explains the nutroots.

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Now, let’s count the number of times the same whiners have condemned the numerous statements and videos published advocating Arabs slaughtering non-Arabs.

Funny how that works.

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Quite frankly, I don’t blame them.

Tyler Cowan seems to think that we did.

(As a general tendency I find that economists vastly underrate the importance of accounting as an economic force.  I might add that many market advocates are unaware of how quickly liquidity can vanish in these markets; just look at auction-rate securities.)

How many phone calls do you think Hank Paulson has received from the Chinese central bank since August 2007?

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I’d really, really like to believe that….

Steve Sailer points the way.

Senator DeMint exposes Democrat lies.

David Friedman takes a look.

he plan includes a bunch of “refundable tax credits.” It is not at all clear to what extent they ought to be counted as reductions in taxes, and to what extent as increases in expenditure.

The accurate term for “refundable tax credits” is “welfare”, since it’s a “refund” of a tax that was never paid.

Transfer payments make up a very large share of the federal budget. With sufficient ingenuity, one could eliminate essentially all of them from the expenditure side by relabelling them refundable tax credits, thus producing, on the books, an enormous reduction in both expenditures and taxes, while actually changing nothing at all. Obama seems to be moving things at least a little farther in that direction.

Oh, there’s a shock….

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According to the article, the following jobs will allow you to live in Harlem.  Amazingly all are Stuff White People Like:

• Lawyer
• Artist
• School Teacher (won lottery)

Non-Profit Organization

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Time to choose, then. “Everybody wants to be Hank Williams, but nobody wants to die.”

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

Megan McArdle dips into sociology.

I’m surprised–though I shouldn’t be, of course–that any number of liberals who are (presumably) comfortable with concepts like unconscious discrimination and privilege when it comes to race, have not even stopped to consider that the same sort of thing might be operating here.

Let’s be honest, coastal folks:  when you meet someone with a thick southern accent who likes NASCAR and attends a bible church, do you think, “hey, maybe this is a cool person”?  And when you encounter someone who went to Eastern Iowa State, do you accord them the same respect you give your friends from Williams?  It’s okay–there’s no one here but us chickens.  You don’t.

Red America exaggerates the contempt, of course.  It’s also true that if you’re expecting racism and sexism, you’ll probably end up misinterpreting perfectly innocent remarks.  But the fact that they aren’t right in every particular does not mean that, in general, they’ve got it wrong.  For one thing, in both DC and New York I’ve spent a fair amount of time listening to liberals make jokes about red states that would horrify them if they were told about blacks.  But even if that weren’t true, I wouldn’t be the best person to assess whether there is prejudice or not.  I’m so close to it that I can’t see it. 

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Standing astride history yelling “Basta!”.

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Just don’t do either one in public.