Read it.

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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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.

Read it.

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?

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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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.

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Reminds me of a classic WKRP in Cincinnati episode.

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Hey, that’s the way things are done in the Overclass. Nobody’s going to take such a job without negotiating a plush severance package, and now they’re stuck with ’em.

Jerry Pournelle is rather crochety when he talks about politics, which of course makes him a favorite with me.

Full disclosure for those few who haven’t figured it out: I am no fan of McCain and I detest the Country Club Republicans who took over when Newt Gingrich left the Speaker’s Office. I was one of Newt’s advisors and while he and I have and had our differences, I think the country is very much worse off without him as Speaker, and we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in had he remained. But while I have disdain  for the the Country Club Republicans — to put a fine point on it see Exeter’s speech to the Dauphin — I have even less regard for the anti-Clinton establishment who have taken control of the Democrats. And no, that doesn’t make me an admirer of Clinton and the New Democrats; it does mean that I think the New Democrats (who have been thoroughly defeated) are more likely to pay attention to realities than crazy theories; and this isn’t true of those who are now running things. I’m a lot more afraid of the Daily Kos than I am of Bill Clinton.

And that says pretty much all that needs to be said on the subject.

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Well — there it is.

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One of the “benefits” of the government getting involved with commerce.

“That’s almost 20 years of hard work and investment by all the personnel here wiped out at the stroke of a pen. It frightens me and revolts me,” he said.

That’s government for you.

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Can you imagine reading a headline “Americans pilfer Russian equipment”?

And that tells you all you really need to know about international relations.

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Jerry Pournelle has both a Kindle and a Sony Reader, and finds that he uses the Kindle almost exclusively.

I just wish the Kindle weren’t so butt-ugly.

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Sort of like a fingerprint for chips.

Steve Sailer reveals the sordid truth that Obama only wanted to organize one community: Can you guess which one?

Ultimately, he didn’t help any steelworkers, black or white. The Southtown Star reported on August 24:

“And none of the laid-off steelworkers Obama talks about in stump speeches, the people he was brought to Chicago to help, could be found for this article, despite repeated requests to the campaign.”

So what is an Obama-style “community organizer?”

It means a radical racial activist who, in Tom Wolfe’s immortal phrase, “mau-maus the flak catchers”—intimidates bureaucrats into giving your ethnicity a bigger slice of the pie. It means, more than anything else, that you organize political protests for more handouts from the taxpayers (even though dependence upon those handouts is one reason the community is so disorganized.)

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Hey, she was just doing her Choice thing, ya know? She just waited a while to be sure.

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Everything I really needed to know I learned from Dungeons & Dragons. (For example: In any group at least 30% are idiots who will do their best to get the rest killed.)

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What’s a mother progressive to do?

Roy decides to hop aboard the bandwagon.

We have the technology.

Read it.