Read it.

Now, imagine if that were hydrogen….

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Not only that, but rats get all the good drugs.

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Gotta love Australians.

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You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred.

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Read it.

When seconds count, police respond in minutes. Buy a gun. Or die. Your choice.

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Reminder: Bureaucracy is a machine; do not be deceived by the fact that it appears to consiste of human beings. At times, it can be a very dumb machine, but by its nature it has no heart.

The Hog reflects on Halloween. He’s hard to please.

Every year, I have to make sure my car isn’t outdoors, because of the vandalism. That ought to tell you all you need to know about the wholesomeness of Halloween.

Mencius Moldbug is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning….

But there are alternatives.

This creeps me out.

Read it.

Specifically, broken ones. Specifically, broken ones made by Barack Obama.

Obama promised — well a campaign promise — that he would accept public financing. I hate the whole notion of Federal financing of campaigns — the Framer must be spinning like tops — but it does seem to me that once one accepts it, one should not be allowed to change one’s mind. Ah. Well.

Read it.

I don’t like vampires. Your classic Dracula is one thing, but all the subsequent Doomed Yet Eternally Glamorous Vampires are tiresome. Even if they do look like Kate Beckinsdale. We wouldn’t be talking about them if they lived on urine or ear wax, but feasting on blood somehow makes them exotic.

And on the future:

The love of chrome-and-glass modern restaurants is probably due to one place, which I’ve mentioned before – the Erie Jr. in Detroit Lakes, MN. It had a counter, a high ceiling, plastic booths in vivid hues, a roof that looked like it space ships could dock in the back, and it had that space-age vibe that shimmered off so many new things when I was very young. We had a keen sense of the future then; we knew the toys we had today would be the tools of the future. You know how you put your hand out the window when you were going fast, and undulated it up and down like a dolphin, riding the oncoming wind? The future felt like that. The future was a chrome-trimmed triangular window in the front of dad’s car, and it had its own knob to open it up.  The future was a hamburger under a light fixture that looked like an atom. The future was going to be awesome.

Read it.

Read it.

We have the technology, apparently.

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Where do they get those wonderful toys?

The Hog wants it perfectly understood that he has quit writing about politics. Absolutely.

I have a feeling one Change we can look forward to is a Change in the leadership of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. If Jones-Kelley is guilty of abusing her position, she needs to be replaced. When a government official does a thing like this to a private citizen, in order to squash his expression of political views, it’s not just a tort or a crime. It’s OPPRESSION. Which starts with “O.” Not that I’m suggesting anything.

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Words fail me.

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A diary has come to light detailing the exploits of John Bond, an Elizabethan secret agent whose family motto is “Non Sufficit Orbis” – The World Is Not Enough.

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Eventually they hope to get it right.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Now how many governments can cause that kind of change so quickly?

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Mara Carfagna, an ex-showgirl who posed topless for men’s magazines and a favourite of the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, will become the face of his right-wing coalition.

The Italians have their own unique way of doing things.

Read it.

And redheads are reserved for the truly fortunate.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Things are looking grim for Obama when even the socialists at the Associated Press bad-mouth him.

Read it.

In the old days it was called “Gestapo”.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

From exchanging emails with him, I’ve known for a decade that Paul Krugman was an egomaniacal jerk, but he was always described as being intelligent. Yet, here are parts of a 1998 column he wrote in Slate that is just jaw-droppingly dumb. This is the kind of thinking that kept us from having the medium strong recession we deserved in 2001 after the Tech Bubble, instead, postponing it until a recession/depression of Biblical proportions arrives now.

The Hog undergoes a change of life. Sort of.

I feel like God and gardening are all I write about these days. I guess it’s monotonous for a lot of people. Can’t seem to do anything about it, however.

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Apparently $150k a year is all it takes. Who knew?

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College life in the 13th century was no bed of roses.

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Whoa — better keep that away from Democrats. It could get ugly.

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And garderners everywhere rejoice.

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In one of the most extraordinary episodes in African legal history, a panel of judges from Senegal, Mali and Togo will tomorrow issue a verdict expected to give fresh hope to more than 40,000 people being held as slaves in rural Niger and across the region.

Thought we’d gotten rid of slavery? Think again. Reminder: Islam has no problem with slavery. Saudi Arabia only abolished slavery (formally; it still exists informally) in the Beatles era.

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Nothing uncertain about these times; if you want to buy a gun, better do it before Barack becomes President.

George Will takes a look at Democrats and education. “Leave no pot of money undipped.”

Washington is having a Willie Sutton Moment. Such moments occur when government, finding its revenue insufficient for its agenda, glimpses some money it does not control but would like to.

Watch it.

I have to confess that the more I learn about black culture the less it makes any sense to me. I find the Japanese much easier to comprehend.

Read it.

One of my big complaints with the law making process is that there’s no built-in process to make sure a law actually does what it’s intended to do. Thanks to the law of unintended consequences, quite frequently, laws do plenty of other stuff, but do little to accomplish their stated purpose. Since politicians just want to pass laws so they can tell voters about the laws they passed, there’s no real review process. So, as long as a Congress member can claim “I helped build houses/protect children/save jobs/etc.,” because of a law that is called the Build Houses Act/Protect Kids Act/Save Jobs Act, they’re happy — even if the law did nothing to actually build houses, protect kids or save jobs.

Read it.

OK, the stage is set for an epic confrontation: the libertarian medical wingnuts of Arizona against the New Age psychological moonbats of California, with Barack Obama in the middle of it all. Can the robocalls be far behind? News at 11:00.

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On September 18, we released a report in Caracas that shows how President Hugo Chávez has undermined human rights guarantees in Venezuela. That night, we returned to our hotel and found around twenty Venezuelan security agents, some armed and in military uniform, awaiting us outside our rooms. They were accompanied by a man who announced—with no apparent sense of irony—that he was a government “human rights” official and that we were being expelled from the country.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

Read it.

Turns out that rich people are anxious about the economy. Who knew?

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Of course — that’s what Marxist dictators do.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

Bush and Rove bought Latino votes in 2004 with Other People’s Money. Bush’s Housing Bubble was, more than anything else, a Hispanic Housing Bubble, with total mortgage dollars for Hispanic homebuyers going up an incredible 691% from 1999 to 2006. And all that cash flowing for home loans and home equity loans, whether to Hispanics or others, paid for a lot of Hispanic construction and home improvement workers.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Read it.

And, of course, no treatment of Dracula would be complete without reference to Fred Saberhagen’s re-interpretation (which actually makes more sense than Stoker’s).

Read it.

For those who want an “Islamic Reformation”: you’ve already got one, and the Muslim Brotherhood is it. Dedicated reformers blow themselves and innocent bystanders up almost every day in “Palestine”, Pakistan, India, London, and virtually every other place in the world that has a significant Muslim presence.

Megan McArdle is confused.

I confess I still don’t understand why poverty is so increasingly linked with obesity.  The common explanation is to blame the paucity of excellent cheap grocery stores in urban neighborhoods. But poverty is not exclusively an inner city phenomenon; poor people in more rural areas share grocery stores with the rich.  Besides, while this explains the latitudinal data, it does not account for the longitudinal issue.  No one thinks that New York’s grocery stores, even in poor neighborhoods, have gotten worse since the 1970s; the evidence is that they’ve gotten better.  But the obesity rate has gotten much worse.

Uh, Megan, perhaps because the word doesn’t mean what you think it means? “Poverty” in the U.S. has come to mean “only one color TV” or “no high-speed broadband Internet”. This is not what people prior to the 1960s understood “poverty” to mean. “Poverty” means not knowing where your next meal is coming from. You don’t get fat on that kind of diet.

Read it.

Throw them to the lions! Oh, wait….