Read it.

Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, has started a new blog for the non-religious right. The linked article is a fine example of what you can find there.

When I said that “Any given theology is of zero interest to anyone outside the tribe,” I meant of interest in the way that a real intellectual discipline — math, biology, history — is of general interest. From the fact that a person wants to study microbiology, I can deduce nothing about his tribe or fictive tribe (e.g. religion). From the fact that a person wants to make a serious, engaged, non-hostile study of Islamic theology, I can deduce with high probability that he is a Muslim.

Further indicia of quality are that Walter Olson and Heather MacDonald blog there. Well worth your time.

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The Rev. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, a revolutionary Nicaraguan priest, sounded like the old-school, 1980s-style Latin American leftist he is when he began his presidency of the 192-member U.N. General Assembly in September.

I give up — what business does a “revolutionary Nicaraguan priest” have being President of the U.N. General Assembly? And what benefit has any “revolutionary Nicaraguan priest” ever brought to Nicaragua, much less the rest of the world? Truly, this is Fantasy Land. And your taxes are paying for it! Aren’t you proud?

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I don’t doubt that many people shop at Wal-mart in order to save money, but I seriously doubt that this insane mob of people consisted mostly of suburban mothers looking for jumbo-sized diaper packs. No, these were people looking for slashed prices on electronics, outdoor gear, and clothing. These were bargain shoppers, for sure, but no one who stepped on Damour’s chest was there because they had run out of bread and heating oil.

One of the great blind spots that “caring people” have is the inability to appreciate that there are people in the world who just don’t care. Appreciating that historically demonstrable fact is the true basis of wisdom.

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Two powerful employee organizations are pressing the Bush administration to prove that in its final weeks, political aides are not improperly winning career government jobs at the expense of more qualified workers.

I don’t think this was written as a satire, since it’s in the Washington Post rather than The Onion, but I had to look to make sure, and I’m still not certain.

Amity Schlaes gives Krugman some noogies.

Here’s the meat:

Mr. Krugman is a new Nobel Laureate, teaches at Princeton University and writes a column for a nationally prominent newspaper. So what he says is believed to be objective by many people, even when it isn’t. But the larger reason we should care about the 1930s employment record is that the cure Roosevelt offered, the New Deal, is on everyone else’s mind as well. In a recent “60 Minutes” interview, President-elect Barack Obama said, “keep in mind that 1932, 1933, the unemployment rate was 25%, inching up to 30%.”

The New Deal is Mr. Obama’s context for the giant infrastructure plan his new team is developing. If he proposes FDR-style recovery programs, then it is useful to establish whether those original programs actually brought recovery. The answer is, they didn’t. New Deal spending provided jobs but did not get the country back to where it was before.

And here’s the moral: Even somebody who has impeccable Establishment credentials can be demonstrably wrong in pursuit of a political agenda. This is why it’s important not to just believe somebody because they have a lot of tickets punched, but to make them show you the numbers, and be able to explain them in terms a non-specialist can understand. “Trust me, I’m an expert” is the worst of all bases for public policy.

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I am not making this up.

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Alan Scherr was an art professor with a comfortable life in the Maryland suburbs, but he spent 25 years studying Transcendental Meditation in a quest for something more. The search took him and his family to Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, where they shed their old life in Silver Spring and meditated in the complex of a New Age mystic.

So you know he’ll come to a bad end. If you saw this in a movie you would think, “Sheesh, what a hackneyed cliché.” And you’d be right.

As they mourned the deaths, family and friends struggled to comprehend how a man defined by his quiet spirituality had met such a violent end — along with the daughter who was raised in part by monks in the family-like atmosphere of the rural Synchronicity compound, 30 miles from Charlottesville.

Hint: There are evil people in the world, evil people who don’t give a shit about your search for peace.

Naomi, a high-achieving student who was home-schooled at the compound and planned to attend boarding school in New York next fall, was shot next, Lang said. “It’s hard for me to imagine the rationale for shooting a 13-year-old girl in the back of the head,” he added. “Naomi was the sweetest, loveliest, most innocent young girl.”

You don’t need to imagine it — just accept that there are others who do, who will gladly do it to you if given the chance.

Master Charles remains in India, where he escaped the attacks by spending 45 hours locked in his hotel room.

And that’s their response. if you close your eyes hard enough, you’ll become invisible.

And let’s not forget their enablers, people who write articles like this for the Washington Post.

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Germany reverts to the Middle Ages.

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One of the primary functions of a government is to ensure that people can go about their daily business in peace. It would appear that Mexico does not, effectively, have a government.

The Hog advises on tools.

I don’t just want tools. I want tools that make things easy. Over and over, I have said that the real purpose of tools is to end frustration. My idea of hell is spending every day doing jobs with the wrong tools. While listening to rap. And wearing bell bottoms. And drinking Budweiser. In France.

This principle is why people who create new slot designs for fasteners should be released naked in the middle of the Libyan desert at midnight. During the scorpion rut. Every time a new slot design is created, people who want to be able to turn screws have to buy at least three new drivers and a bunch of bits. I have tons of these things, I and I still can’t turn all the screws I encounter. That leads to fun activities like trying to turn screws with a small Vise Grip. Put it on, start to turn, watch it pop off. Repeat for four hours. Check Expedia for fares to Libya.

I already know the name of my next book. “1,000 Exotic Fasteners and How to Strip Them.”

Read it.

And what does this tell us about rap music and the “culture” that spawned it?

Go on, take a guess.

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Last weekend in the suburbs of Cairo, a congregation of Coptic Christians was besieged inside a newly-opened church by thousands of angry Muslims. It seems the Copts had had the temerity to open the church in a converted factory, and, as we all know, Islamic law forbids the establishment of new churches anywhere in Dar al-Islam.

The Muslim mob quickly converted the church into a mosque by praying there, and then went on a rampage against the church and the homes and businesses of Christians.

Bear in mind that the Copts are the original inhabitants of Egypt. How would the world press react if Native Americans opened a sweat lodge in Omaha and were immediately attacked by mobs of screaming Baptists? The question answers itself.

Read it.

Guess, if you can, which one will actually happen.

C’mon, take a chance.

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Domestic producers of the renewable fuel have been selling huge quantities of biodiesel in Europe and in other foreign markets, where prices are often better, and then receiving a $1-per-gallon tax credit from Uncle Sam.

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

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I love these charts that people create to try to peg others politically.

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

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As oil prices recede from all-time dollar highs and some of the hot air gets let out of energy policy debates, it’s a good time to remember that here’s a key concept missing from almost every popular discussion of the subject: energy density. Specialist economists get it, but almost nobody else does. It is important to understanding why most forms of “alternative energy” are mirages, and what a sane energy policy would actually look like.

Wisdom. Attend.

It is raining small furry animals outside, which means that all the nimrods who were camped out at Best Buy are miserable. I am inside a warm house, with food in the fridge, plenty of cold Pepsi, and no place I have to be for the next three days. I have the Internet and two huge stacks of books, one from the library and one from my wallet. My wife is asleep, which means that I don’t have to look at any cute pictures of cats.

It don’t get any better than this, as we say here in Texas.

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One of the major surprises I received when I moved out of childhood into the real world, was the degree to which the world is stratified by genuine competence.

But entering the real world, I found out that the average mortal really can’t be an executive.  Even the average manager can’t function without a higher-level manager above them.  What is it that makes an executive?  I don’t know, because I’m not a professional in this area.  If I had to take a guess, I would call it “functioning without recourse” – living without any level above you to take over if you falter, or even to tell you if you’re getting it wrong.  To just get it done, even if the problem requires you to do something unusual, without anyone being there to look over your work and pencil in a few corrections.

Read it.

Whenever someone exhorts you to “think outside the box”, they usually, for your convenience, point out exactly where “outside the box” is located.  Isn’t it funny how nonconformists all dress the same…

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Colleges and college towns have become bastions of intolerance and enforced conformity. Political correctness? That’s not the tenth of it. I’m talking about the stifling of speech, dissent, or any deviation from orthodoxy. Colleges have gone from citadels of intellectual openness to dungeons of intellectual coercion. And in support of what? High ideals such as the canons of Western thought (freedom, liberty, justice, sovereignty of the individual, the inviolability of property rights)? More often, it’s the undermining of the same.

If this is news to you, you haven’t been paying attention, and you certainly haven’t experienced being flunked for your views (not your scholarship), having your perfectly reasonable points of view confiscated and trashed and/or burned (if they appeared in print), being shouted down, prevented from gaining a hearing, or having your audiences intimidated and threatened, your tenure denied, your application rejected, or your grant stripped.

The Gothic Gulag is alive and well in blue America.

Read it.

Sign me up. I’d like to see how many Democrats in Congress could solve a quadratic equation — or recognize the quadratic formula if they saw it.

Steve Sailer is quoting someone else but is still to be commended for bringing it to a wider audience, which it richly deserves. (NAM means “Non-Asian Minority”)

Every single one of these has the same form:

1) NAM group behaves badly
2) Media reports it as nonspecific problem of “society” and refuses to mention specific culpability
3) The government increases its power and forces non-NAMs to pay for their bad behavior
4) Refusal to address root causes increased rates of taxation, crime, victimization. Everything from airport security strip searches of grandma to gun seizures from law abiding citizens to forced busing into Rwanda-like schools is a function of this systematic attribution error.

This movie ends badly.

Read it.

Indeed — why not?

What about international law? Article 110 of the U.N.’s Law of the Sea Convention — ratified by most nations, but not by the U.S. — enjoins naval ships from simply firing on suspected pirates. Instead, they are required first to send over a boarding party to inquire of the pirates whether they are, in fact, pirates. A recent U.N. Security Council resolution allows foreign navies to pursue pirates into Somali waters — provided Somalia’s tottering government agrees — but the resolution expires next week. As for the idea of laying waste, Stephen Decatur-like, to the pirate’s prospering capital port city of Eyl, this too would require U.N. authorization. Yesterday, a shippers’ organization asked NATO to blockade the Somali coast. NATO promptly declined.

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Not really news, but a good reminder that a lot of people out there are just stone-stupid.

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

And those who doubt that somebody writing for Slate magazine knows anything useful about money or economics? I share your concern. For such people, Mencius Moldbug has the answer.

Read it.

Just imagine what all of the eco-nutters who shrink from irradiated food will do with this one.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Shi Yongxin, the abbot of Shaolin, said he had signed a 20-year contract to manage the Tuwang, Fading, Miaozhan and Guangyin temples in Kunming.

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So, say you’ve had a good relationship with a credit card company and been paying off substantially more than minimum payment over recent months. You’ve also completely paid off other credit cards in recent months. You then get a notice from the credit card company saying they’re reducing your credit limit, right before Christmas. Would you be more than a little miffed?

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Good. Perhaps the Left Coast and New Englad will go join Canada where they belong.

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Britain may be ahead of us here.

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

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Lessons to be learned:

• Don’t give your boyfriend nude pictures of yourself.
• Stay away from Facebook.

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The trouble is, almost everything we’ve been taught about the first Thanksgiving in 1621 is a myth. The holiday has two distinct histories – the actual one and a romanticized portrayal.

Very true.

No one is certain whether the Wampanoag and the colonists regularly sat together and shared their food, or if the three-day “thanksgiving” feast Mr. Winslow recorded for posterity was a one-time event.

Not even close. What the Pigrims were doing is the Martinmas feast, traditional in England from time out of mind.

From the late 4th century CE to the late Middle Ages, much of Western Europe, including Great Britain, engaged in a period of fasting beginning on the day after St. Martin’s Day, November 11. This fast period lasted 40 days, and was, therefore, called “Quadragesima Sancti Martini”, which means in Latin “the forty days of St. Martin.” At St. Martin’s eve, people ate and drank very heartily for a last time before they started to fast. This fasting time was later called “Advent” by the Church. #

Orthodox Christians still observe this pre-Nativity fast. The Pilgrims couldn’t refer to a “papist” Saint’s day, of course, so they “repurposed” it as a harvest festival … but it was the traditional Martinmas feast.

“But wait”, you say, “November 11 is not even close to the last Thursday in November.” Not now, but it used to be — in 1627 the Gregorian Calendar hadn’t yet come to England, and the Julian calendar they used was 11 days ahead of the actual solar time. Let’s see: November 11 plus 11 days equals — November 22! Their November 11 would be our November 22. (Yeah, it’s not exact, but in this, as in so much else, I blame FDR.)

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Let’s get ready to start counting the bruises.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

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Gotta love Australians.

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Can’t really blame them. Given the choice between moving to Britain and moving to Australia, I’d pick Australia every time.

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What’s not to like?

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The grownups step in.

We wonder this morning if an Iowa foursome who tried to arrest Karl Rove back in July is wishing they’d had a tutorial on the topic. The four were cited for trespassing after attempting a citizen’s arrest of Rove at the Wakonda County Club in Des Moines, where he spoke at a Republican fundraiser. They were stopped at the country club’s entry gate. On Friday, a jury returned guilty verdict against all four.

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Okay, take your best guess: Which one is Peter, and which one Wendy?

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And they want to close Guantanamo….

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“Two mobile applications, NMobile and Trapster, are providing drivers with up-to-date maps of speed-enforcement zones with live police traps, speed cameras or red-light cameras. Each application pulls up a map pinpointing the locations of speed traps within driving distance and an audio alert will sound as vehicles approach an area tagged as harboring a speed trap.

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And I’ll bet not one of them looked like a partridge.

Steve Sailer has a suspicious mind.

Spending hundreds of billions of the taxpayers’ dollars to keep illegal immigrant construction workers previously employed putting up unneeded McMansions in exurban Las Vegas from leaving the U.S. is a small price to pay for future Democratic dominance.