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Well — there it is.

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Adjusting for various demographic factors, the economists found that children with more access to TV had better test scores than those with less. The effects were especially keen for kids in homes where English wasn’t the primary language or parents had little education.

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Of course, they could also put more soundproofing in the damned thing.

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Slow news day.

Arnold Kling has the solution.

The demise of the savings and loans produced the rise of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. One can argue that Fannie and Freddie were more efficient and better hedged against interest-rate volatility than the savings and loans. If Fannie and Freddie had stuck firmly to the 20 percent downpayment mortgage, we would not need a mortgage czar today. But they didn’t stick to it, and we are where we are.

So the answer, as in so many areas of life, is to be conservative. Funny how well that works.

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Gas prices have been falling steadily since … when? Oh, gee, maybe it was when President Bush cancelled the Executive Order that barred drilling on the continental shelf.

What an odd coincidence.

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The black and white, E Ink device features a wireless link to download content, room enough to store “hundreds of pages of newspapers, books, and documents,” and a display more than twice the size of the wee Kindle while suffering just half the ugly.

Gotta like that.

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That would be amusing.

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“When the Americans started bombing the Taliban, the Frontier Corps started shooting at the Americans,” we were told by one of Suran Dara’s villagers, who, like the others, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being persecuted or killed by the Pakistani government or the Taliban. “They were trying to help the Taliban. And then the American planes bombed the Pakistani post.”

What a friend we have in Pakistan….

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Anybody who is upset by the sight of a mother nursing her child needs to get out more.

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1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here.

Think of the Post Office in charge of your health care.

That’s what the Democrats want to do to us.

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Get your scorecards out.

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Wait till the Muslims find out about that. I see an assassination in his future.

Lord Winston is moving the research project from Britain to America after British regulations and a shortage of funding prevented experiments here. The pigs will be bred in Missouri.

Land of the free, and home of the brave.

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In the Good Old Days, a German University student would have made science, not art, out of DNA.

But that was then; this is now.

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The chain-restaurant theory of international relations.

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The art of poetry is not dead. Unfortunately, it’s vehicle, language, may be.

This phenomenon is discussed in greater depth here.

My experience is that rising-intonation used at the end of supposedly declarative sentences is characteristic of women and homosexuals, but that may just be observational bias on my part.

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David Frum, a charter member of the doom-and-gloom wing of the Republican Party, doesn’t always get the right answers — but he usually asks the right questions.

Measured by money income, Washington qualifies as one the most unequal cities in the United States. Yet these two very different halves of a single city do share at least one thing. They vote the same way: Democratic. And in this, we are not alone. As a general rule, the more unequal a place is, the more Democratic; the more equal, the more Republican. The gap between rich and poor in Washington is nearly twice as great as in strongly Republican Charlotte, N.C.; and more than twice as great as in Republican-leaning Phoenix, Fort Worth, Indianapolis and Anaheim.

And a lot of his observations are spot-on. The Democrats are the Party of Inequality, and have been ever since they found that a conspiracy of the Overclass and the Underclass against the middle class was a winning political formula.

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We have the technology.

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I’ve always thought that we can do better than huge bird-killing fans.

Read it. And watch the video.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading. When he channels Tom Wolfe, it doesn’t get any better.

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Maybe, or maybe not — but it’s still an interesting idea.

The inimitable Mencius Moldbug explores new ground.

The Amerikaners’ problem is that they’re governed by their enemies, the progressives, who have converted democratic politics into a reality show and rule through the extended civil service. The civil service is nominally responsible to the elected arms, but the latter would have to put up a terrible fight to even touch them. And progressives fight the peril of a “populist” democratic reaction with two slow, but inevitably lethal, strangulation tactics: subsidized progressive education, and Morlock voter importation.

Read it. And watch the video.

This is pretty cool.

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Jean-Yves and Bernadette Delane were sailing to France from Australia when they were captured on board their 16-metre French sailing boat Carre d’as in the pirate-ridden waters of the Gulf of Aden on Tuesday.

Well, there you go – avoid the pirate-ridden waters of the Gulf of Aden if you’re rich people on a yacht.

The Maker Movement.

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Pretty bad when even the French are offended.

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Judgments of young Americans’ civic knowledge range from “grim” (Stephen Goldsmith, chairman of the Corporation for National and Community Service) to “abysmal” (Diane Ravitch, New York University historian of education) and “disturbing” (George W. Bush). None is overstating the case. Last year, the Education Department’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) revealed that less than a quarter of grade-school students are proficient in civics and American history, the subjects meant to prepare them to be responsible citizens.

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I am not making this up.

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No, this is not an extract from the Stuff White People Like book. Although it would certainly fit in.

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Perhaps the conspiracy theorists were right all along.

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Let that be a lesson to us all: Skinny people are dumbos. Knew it all the time.

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And the saddest part is that they don’t even realize how insane that sounds.

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Think of it as evolution in action.

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I am not making this up.

“Community organizers work in neighborhoods that have been hit hardest by the failing economy,” said John Raskin, founder of Community Organizers of America and a community organizer on the West Side of Manhattan.  “The last thing we need is for Republican officials to mock us on television when we’re trying to rebuild the neighborhoods they have destroyed.  Maybe if everyone had more houses than they can count, we wouldn’t need community organizers.  But I work with people who are getting evicted from their only home.  If John McCain and the Republicans understood that, maybe they wouldn’t be so quick to make fun of community organizers like me.”

So basically “community organizers” are left-wing agitators who try to herd the Underclass together in order to exert political pressure to squeeze more oink from the public trough. I notice that these people seem to flourish primarily in large, Democrat-run urban areas, like New York and Chicago, where “enlightened public policy” have destroyed families and neighborhoods for the last 40 years.  One hand washes the other, I guess.

Wonder what these people do for a day job? I suspect that it all comes out of the taxpayers’ pockets ultimately.

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France does that to some people.

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After showing his army pass when asked for identification by the hotel’s receptionist, Cpl Stringer was told “we don’t accept military personnel here” and that this was “company policy”, according to his mother Gaynor.

He spent the night in his car after failing to find any other available accomodation late on a Sunday evening, she said.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in California.

Read it.

“For more than two years, the Chinese have stalled [on nuclear talks],” said one defense official frustrated by what he called excessive secrecy and lack of dialogue. He asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the topic.

Whoa, there’s a shock: A Communist dictatorship being secretive and stalling talks?

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No surprises here. Among Arabs, Africans, and other tribal societies, public employment is seen as hitching a ride on the friends-and-family gravy train, not as an actual job.

Any African looking at Barack Obama would see a typical waBenzi: Progressing through elite schools, getting into “public service” as a ward heeler “community organizer” and working his way up the Chicago political machine, getting plum jobs for his friends and relatives and receiving cushy deals in return.

If he gets elected President, they’ll be standing in line — with their hands out.

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We have the technology.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

There’s a line in the Stuff White People Like book to the effect of: “Is there something you like? I mean, is there something you really like? Well, whatever it is, there’s a white person who likes it more.”

What I find most interesting about this situation is that the argument seems to be focusing on whether the Demcorat Presidential nominee is or is not more qualified to be President than the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee. Does that strike anybody else as just … odd?

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Not really news, to anybody who’s paying attention, but a good reminder.

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I’ll just bet that NetFlix is feeling some pressure here.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Tell the truth — that’s the first time you’ve thought about her in a week, isn’t it?

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Not sure whether this represents progress or not….

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Engineers are very strange people. Useful, though.