Read it.

I think they’re taking this wind power thing a bit too far.

Read it.

We know what they are, now we’re just dickering over price.

Read it.

Well, they worked for the samurai, didn’t they. Oh, wait….

Read it.

Reefer Madness, part deux.

Read it.

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

Read it.

A very entertaining explanation of fractional reserve banking and why it’s so fragile.

This illustration is a microcosm (with very conservative levels of lending) of what happened before the banking world stopped turning. In the same way that Bank A borrowed £1,000 from Mr P and turned it into £2,600 of spendable cash for the other people in the chain, so when banks borrow millions they turn it into many millions more of lending. Any snapshot of the amount of money in the world economy reflects not just the real money but also the additional money “created” by commercial lending.

Read it.

In the past several weeks, the shift of press-corps sentiment against McCain has been stark and undeniable, even among heavies such as Matthews long accused by the left of being residents of the Arizonan’s amen corner. Jonathan Alter, Joe Klein, Richard Cohen, David Ignatius, Jacob Weisberg: all former McCain admirers now turned brutal critics. Equally if not more damaging, the shift has been just as pronounced, if less operatic, among straight-news reporters. Suddenly, McCain is no longer being portrayed as a straight-talking, truth-telling maverick but as a liar, a fraud, and an opportunist with acute anger-management issues.

Could it be that it’s because he’s actually running against a Democrat? Could it be that he’s no longer bashing his fellow Republicans? (Or, at least, not so much.) Did anybody truly not expect this? I know for a fact that Rush Limbaugh predicted precisely this when McCain ran against Bush in the Republican Presidential primaries.

Read it.

Note that it isn’t a huge publicly-funded university, but a smaller private college, that is leading the charge here.

Read it.

Better make those compact fluorescents, though, or the Thought Police will be after you.

Read it.

How useful.

Read it.

They’ve destroyed their own country, they’re a bunch of genocidal maniacs, and it’s our fault.

Associated with an “aid agency” ought to be an indictable offense.

Megan McArdle explains it all to you.

Is by looking at another kind of crash:  exploding Space Shuttles.

Read it.

Well, I guess that makes it official. Pretend is just as good as reality.

I think I’ll run for something as Barack Obama. Hey, I can dress up like him.

(Oh, and you might want to avoid the state of Georgia until further notice.)

Read it.

Read it.

Over these years we had violent financial crashes of various types, bank panics, piles of recessions and a huge depression, many foreign wars and one enormous domestic war, had a central bank and didn’t, were on the gold standard and weren’t, had governments topple in scandal and multiple leaders assassinated, and what did it all amount to in the medium to long run? In per-capita income terms: Nothing. The overall trend does not bend or shift. Every bad year was followed by a good year that returned us to trend.

Read it.

India is where we will be.

Read it.

What do you think is paying for AlGore’s Manhattan-sized carbon footprint?

Read it.

Pythons will be pythons….

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Boy, there’s a shocker.

Read it.

Towns not on interstates cannot make it we are told, towns that are not hip and exciting are dead. And so, our young people leave — with at least a casual observance that those left behind are falling to the drug culture. In a recent focus group of young males in one eastern Kentucky town one participant stated, “Sure I sell drugs — it’s easy money and I don’t have the connections to get a job even at Wal-Mart.”

A lot of it, I think, is convenient transportation. In the Good Old Days, it was difficult to move, so people stayed put. Nowadays it’s easy to move, so people staying put is surprising. I was born in one town in Indiana, and my parents moved us to another when I was too young to remember. I stayed in that town until I was 9, then my parents moved us back close to where I was born, where we stayed until I joined the Navy. I was therefore on the leading edge of the “let’s move if it might be better over there” trend. it never even occurred to me that I might stay in the small town (45,000) where I went to high school. I suspect that people just don’t have that expectation any more. Our communities are not where we live but those we share interests with through politics or hobbies or other connections — I’m closer to people I went to college with 20 years ago than whoever it is that lives next door to the house I’ve been in for the last 10 years, whom I’ve never met.

Read it.

Seems as if they ought to have been doing this at least since World War I. Rather a telling omission.

Read it.

Mostly by eating meat, it seems. Further proof that vegetarianism is dumb.

Read it.

Women are actually an alien species. I’ve always said so.

Well, at least it wasn’t $12 million to a dog. That’s a hostile alien species.

Read it.

Mr. BUFFETT: Well, it’s really an incredible case study in regulation
because something called OFHEO was set up in 1992 by Congress, and the sole job of OFHEO was to watch over Fannie and Freddie, someone to watch over them. And they were there to evaluate the soundness and the accounting and all of that. Two companies were all they had to regulate. OFHEO has over 200 employees now. They have a budget now that’s $65 million a year, and all they have to do is look at two companies. I mean, you know, I look at more than two companies

So, of course: The government’s response to this failure of regulation is — more regulation! With more government employees and a higher budget, of course.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

This suggests that there is no way to avoid disasters permanently. That’s no doubt true. But we can make them rarer and less catastrophic just by being less stupid. Consider two economies, both of which either grow 5% per year or shrink 5% per year. The first economy is more bubble-prone, so it grows for seven years then shrinks for three years. The second economy grows for ten years, then shrinks for two years. Over the course of sixty years (six cycles for the first economy, five for the second), the second economy will end up over twice as big.

Read it.

When social order declines through bad leadership, common sense is not to best on the past — the social order that just failed — but to bet on the future, which is getting your pile of cash away from the idiots before they screw it up again. I think that’s why people who are older and wiser and accustomed to this system have not really blinked at this bailout. Waste all your money keeping the system going? Of course they did — they do it with every single thing they do, every day. When society is ruled by popularity, it tends to deny social order, because individuals don’t want to be obligated. They want to be free. As a result, it creates decaying situations in which anyone with a brain would do as those Wall Street traders did — raid while the raiding’s good, because soon the idiots will destroy the rest of it with another well-intentioned, unrealistic plan. Civilization is its own enemy.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

Time to take it back? Just asking.

Read it.

Well, then, let’s rush right out and do it.

Perhaps painting black people white would end racism. Somebody get on the horn to Jesse Jackson.

Read it.

At first sight, the idea seems plausible. True, vertical farming would be a non-starter if urban rents were higher than rural rents. But we all know that land is just as cheap in downtown Manhattan as it is in rural Nebraska, right? One wonders, though, why farming moved off the island a more than a century ago.

Professor Despommier claims that food grown indoors would be pesticide-free, unlike that dirty outdoor produce. Once again, totally plausible. Big American cities are as free of rats and roaches as Ireland is of snakes. The Museum of Natural History has a glass case containing the last rat found in New York City, way back before World War I. (Just don’t look down at the tracks when you are waiting for a subway).

But then if we admit there are millions of rats and billions of roaches, then the crops growing in vertical farms would have to be protected by enough rat and roach poison to kill Xerxes’ army. Fortunately, in rat- and roach-free urban America, that is not a consideration. And even if it were, we would not need to worry that health inspectors would be bribed to overlook the rodent droppings and roach eggs in our tenth-story grown arugula. The civil servants in New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia are known worldwide for their incorruptibility.

Read it.

In other words, he’s scared of America.

Read it.

When you first come across some obscure cultural artifact — an unknown indie band, organic skate sneakers or wireless headphones from Finland — you will want to erupt with ecstatic enthusiasm. This will highlight the importance of your cultural discovery, the fineness of your discerning taste, and your early adopter insiderness for having found it before anyone else.

Then, a few weeks later, after the object is slightly better known, you will dismiss all the hype with a gesture of putrid disgust. This will demonstrate your lofty superiority to the sluggish masses. It will show how far ahead of the crowd you are and how distantly you have already ventured into the future.

No, this isn’t a proto-entry in Stuff White People Like, but an actual column in the New York Times.

The name “David Brooks” does not usually jump to mind when one is searching for the names of humor writers, but apparently he’s attempting to broaden his career path. I wish him luck.

Read it.

Two companies in the United States have won new patents on ways to convince the brain we are consuming foods that are far sweeter or saltier than they actually are. The firms are working with Cadburys and Coca-Cola to create healthy yet appealing products.

Read it.

The Brownshirts and Blueshirts reborn. Thank God you don’t live in Europe.

Read it.

The U.S. government has been sending fewer Iraqi immigrants to Michigan because of its struggling economy, though some expect refugees to make their way here anyway, costing the cash-strapped state more in the long run.

Gee, you mean immigrants come here and promptly go on welfare? My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Michigan is one of the nation’s top destinations for Iraqi refugees, having received about 3,000 of the 13,823 Iraqi refugees allowed into the country between Oct. 1, 2007, and Sept. 30, based on State Department figures obtained by the Associated Press.

That might have something to do with the fact that the Detroit area has the largest concentration of Muslims on North American continent. Times being what they are, you can’t impose shari’a law without a sufficient number of sandals on the ground.

Michigan has had the nation’s highest average annual jobless rate since 2006. The seasonally adjusted August jobless rate of 8.9 percent was the highest in the state since late 1992.

That’s what being run by Democrats will do for you, as I keep trying to get through to my brother and his leftoid wife.

Read it.

Works for me.

It is a mark of maturity on the behalf of Latinos as an immigrant ethnic group that they should want an extraneous layer of government to call their own and provide patronage jobs for the politically faithful.

It’s the American way.

Read it.

How long before people in America do the same?

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

As a native Californian, something that I’ve noticed is an increasing intellectual disconnection between the power centers of the East and the reality on the ground in California. At bottom, this financial crisis is California’s fault. But Wall Street and Washington seemed to have no clue what California was like in this decade. Observe, for instance, all the incredulity when I’ve pointed out the role of Latinos in the housing fiasco.

Read it.

That’s a great picture of an alpaca. Wouldn’t mind having some of those myself, since my wife is a knitter.

Read it.

I lust for an iPhone, but I’m not willing to deal with Cingular/AT&T to get one. This post illustrates why. My wife and I briefly had mobile phone service with Cingular/AT&T, and it was unpleasant. (Quite unlike the “old” AT&T, which was fantastic until Cingular bought them and infected the whole organization with their craptacular attitudes.)

Read it.

Read it.

Presumably the Georgians see themselves as the new mujahadeen.

Cringely thinks that my chosen career field, database development, will be going away soon.

Perhaps I ought to retire soon.

Read it.

Well, that’s not what I’d call a “close shave”, but I suppose the photo is worth sharing.

Read it.

I’d be happy to criticize but I can’t say with a straight face that the CIA does any better.