Read it.

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.

Read it.

Well — there it is.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.)

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.)

Read it.

What’s a mother progressive to do?

Roy decides to hop aboard the bandwagon.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Read it.

Well — there it is.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

“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….

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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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I find this to be mildly disquieting.

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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.

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.