Read it.

Boogie down.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Is AlGore in town?

Gotta love that Global Warming.

The Hog isn’t blogging on politics any more. Nope, not a bit. Wouldn’t even think about it.

The gun-haters among us don’t like sporting guns much. But they truly, TRULY hate self-defense guns. And there are a lot of Americans who will stand up for hunters, yet who will abandon people who own guns strictly for self-defense. This is what the Obama regime is counting on. Politically, it’s much easier to take away a Bushmaster than a squirrel gun. So Obama says he sympathizes with “sportsmen.” And Americans who aren’t bright or attentive assume he is referring to all gun owners. It’s a sleazy tactic. It’s obvious to smart people. But most Americans are not geniuses; they can’t see it.

See? No politics here.

Read it.

I have a simpler way:

1. Offer to buy.
2. Offer to lend.
3. Offer to drive.

This will guarantee you more “friends” than a rational person would want to have.

Having friends is vastly overrated. Mostly they wind up owing you money, and when you need help there’s always something that they need to do instead. Can’t see that having friends gets you anything.

The Hog has odd opinions about food.

I don’t understand why the British would avoid Mexican food. It’s not like eating Mexican food requires especially healthy teeth.

If I were Rachel, I just flat wouldn’t go. Not until I located some Mexican joints or confirmed that I could fix my own, using ingredients from English grocery stores. And I’d be scouting out places that serve Indian food. It’s not an ideal substitute, but it comes closer than toad in the hole.

And other subjects.

I used to watch Horatio Hornblower DVDs and marvel at the bravery of the sailors. Cannonballs would come flying into their ships, ripping off arms and legs, and the sailors stayed at their posts, shooting back and calling the French fairies. But bravery had nothing to do with it. They were plastered. Get me drunk enough, and I’ll fight the French, too. Well, okay, I see how ridiculous that looks. Replace “French” with a nationality that fights back. … A stint in the navy would be like climbing into a portal and experiencing the Seventies as Dennis Hopper. Or like going to a typical American college.

Read it.

What sort of peckerwood has nude photos of his wife on his cellphone? I think this is God’s way of telling him to grow up.

Read it.

Puzzled by the leftoid love affair with Islam? Me too.

Tyler Cowen explains it all to you.

Change We Can Believe In.

Read it.

In light of how far we’ve come from our Red State, non-White People roots, this ought to prove amusing, if not useful. Read it with a glass of pretentious Chardonnay and some overpriced Brie.

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Not the sort of news you would expect to find concerning the Outer Hebrides.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Your future under Islam. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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It turns out that about 8 percent of the human genome is made up of viruses that once attacked our ancestors. The viruses lost. What remains are the molecular equivalents of mounted trophies, insects preserved in genomic amber, DNA fossils.

Read it.

While other companies are working to make solar cheaper by using mirrors or lenses to magnify sunlight that is directed into solar cells, Morgan Solar takes a different approach. Their system uses a thin sheet of acrylic to concentrate sunlight 750 times. The sunlight is directed to a tiny cell on the edge of the plastic, greatly reducing the amount of material needed.

Slate has a perfect example.

As a new middle-school teacher, I’m facing a challenge I never thought about before: assigning a list of school supplies for my students. My colleagues tell me that there’s a real downside to wooden pencils, since it gives students an excuse to get up every few minutes and use the pencil sharpener. But am I being environmentally irresponsible by asking parents to buy plastic mechanical pencils?

That’s the question. Answer at your leisure. Use both sides of the toilet paper if necessary.

The Economist gets it right.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

But nobody is talking about the obvious: Will the public works jobs be restricted to American citizens? To American citizens plus legal residents? Or will they just suck in more millions from south of the border as the Housing Bubble did, who will send tens of billions back home, depriving America of Larry’s promised Multiplier Effect?

The real economic collapse is happening in the four sand states, California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida. Sending billions to them for infrastructure projects would mean a large fraction of the public works payroll would go to illegal and legal aliens.

The one sure way to keep the unemployment rate in California (now 8.2%) from growing so fast is to have illegal immigrants go home. It’s a lot cheaper for all concerned if ex-construction workers are unemployed in Mexico or Guatemala than if they are unemployed in California. But nobody is mentioning that.

Read it.

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

Read it.

There’s a universal truth for you.

The Hog looks at current economic affairs.

The Japanese used to make bad cars. They improved. The Koreans make good cars. The Chinese are going to make good cars, too, and they’re going to be dirt cheap. And it’s going to happen right when our bloated car industry is supposed to start paying off on our giant welfare check. Am I the only person who sees a problem here? Would you invest in a failing Burger King, if you knew the Chinese were going to open a similar restaurant next door, charging half as much for the same food?

No.

The UAW needs to get a grip. Their wages are going to plummet, with or without a bailout. That is a certainty. They can’t compete with the Japanese, and when the Chinese show up in force, they’re going to be annihilated. They should be working with the carmakers to increase efficiency and get wages in line with revenues. The free punch and pie are things of the past. The fifty-year-long frat party is OVER.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Read it.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

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Sam O’Shea told his mother Angela that he wanted to take the ‘green’ option and ride the two miles to St Paul’s Primary School, in Portsmouth, Hampshire.

However, staff told Sam and Mrs O’Shea that she would have to follow him to school and pick up his bike because there was nowhere to store it.

Read it.

Read it.

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Well, that’s what happens when the government tries to run your life — you let it do your work as well. People dumping their unwanted kids off in Nebraska is an illustration of the same situation.

Read it.

Certainly better than running into one.

Megan McArdle looks at the one-way left, who demand concessions for their side’s guy that they never gave (or will give) to the other side’s guy.

But beyond the tautological, what does this demand that conservatives recognize that Obama is their president mean?  Are they supposed to root for him to succeed?  One hopes that we are all hoping he will not run the country into the ground.  But since most conservatives believe that Obama’s agenda will, in fact, run the country into the ground, it would not be reasonable to demand that they actually hope he passes it.

Are conservatives supposed to suddenly like Obama? Or at least give him the benefit of the doubt? As far as I can tell, precisely none of the liberals urging this on conservatives obeyed their dicta when George Bush was supposed to be the object of their affections.

Megan McArdle puts on her economist’s hat and runs some numbers.

The real cost center is retiree health care, and as noted above, this is negotiated as part of the labor contract for the current workers.  Due, I’m told, to the UAW’s slightly strange constitution, retirees have more voting power than current workers.  That’s why GM’s medical costs rose at such a staggering rate; they were sacred to the real power in the union.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

We’ve pointed out plenty of times in the past, that any time there’s a database of info out there, the data is almost certain to be abused.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

It’s not the particular government program that’s of major interest, it’s the message the Bush Administration was sending. Federal regulators are supposed to take away the punchbowl when the party gets interesting, but announcing that the President hates down payments, that the Chief Executive feels that requiring people with bad credit to put money down on a house is UnAmerican and probably racist, at a homebuilder’s convention in Las Vegas, well, I’ve exhausted all the punchbowl similes … This is liking filling all the nasal decongestant inhalers at the Betty Ford Clinic with pure pharmaceutical cocaine.

Read it.

Senate Approves Plan Aimed at Protecting Savings From Global Crisis

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Gotta love Australians.

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Historically speaking, the music that white people have kept on life support for the longest period of time is Jazz.  Thanks largely to public radio, bookstores, and coffee shops, Jazz has carved out a niche in white culture that is not yet ready to be replaced by Indie Rock.  But the biggest role that Jazz plays in white culture is in the white fantasy of leisure. All white people believe that they prefer listening to jazz over watching television.  This is not true.

Read it.

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India is subjected to frequent and horrendous terrorist attacks committed by Muslim extremists. If the amount of death and suffering caused by the average Muslim terrorist attack in India were experienced in the West, it would be a crisis of unprecedented magnitude. But such things happen in India all the time.

Read it.

The final version of the study, released yesterday by the U.S. Department of Education, found that students in schools that use Reading First, a program at the core of the No Child Left Behind law, scored no better on comprehension tests than students in similar schools that do not get the funding.

There’s a shocker: Government program doesn’t work while costing a bundle. Stop the presses.

The only surprise here is that they’re actually admitting it.

Read it.

Yeah, they don’t want any threat to the liberal lock on the Civil Service, and they have judged (and who can say they’re wrong?) that he’s just enough of a pussy to roll over for them on that.

Read it.

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

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I still say we need to hook a wind turbine up to AlGore’s mouth, we’d be able to solve our energy problems for decades. Hey, we’re stuck with all that hot air anyway, we might as well get some use out of it.

Read it.

I have an idea: Why not just leave them the hell alone?

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Bet you’d never heard of the “Confrontation Clause” before this, had you. Well, you’d be amazed at the adventurous life we lawyers lead.

Read it.

John Cleese appears to have aged better than the rest of them.