Read it.

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.

Read it.

I’ve been waiting for somebody to come along with a product like this.

Megan McArdle points out how the Indians are doing the job that Americans won’t do.

Read it.

Funny how that works.

Read it.

Read it.

If a fully loaded commercial airliner crashed every single day, killing all passengers and crewmembers on board, how long would it take for dramatic safety improvements to be mandated? Traffic experts say the equivalent is happening on our nation’s roads, with 42,000 people dying every year in automobile accidents, an average of 115 each day.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Most of the people I know who’ve been in car accidents were run into by (uninsured, often unlicensed) drunk illegal immigrants. Not a word about that in the story, of course.

Read it.

Read it.

France has claimed ownership of the Hope Diamond, a star exhibit in Washington’s Smithsonian Institution, using new research to suggest it is actually a legendary gem once owned by King Louis XIV that was looted in the French Revolution.

Good luck with that.

Read it.

Russia plans to raise a schooner that sank off the coast of Finland in 1771 with gold, precious porcelain and Dutch paintings for Empress Catherine the Great aboard.

Read it.

Look at the picture. Would you have guessed that this guy was ‘black’ if the article hadn’t said so? Seriously, I’ve got Italian in-laws that have darker skins than this guy.

Guys, guys, guys — Robert Mugabe is black. Thabo Mbeke is black. This guy is part Negro, the way some people are part Indian; i.e. just enough to brag about and not enough to matter.

Sheesh.

Read it.

Of course Democrats do this regularly and nobody raises an eyebrow.

Gee, this will raise the number of Republicans in the Civil Service from .01% to .015%. The horror….

Bias? What bias?

Read it.

And so it starts.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Sounds like a win-win to me. Who really needs crocodiles? Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

It’s a hit piece, as one would expect from the New York Slimes, but one rarely sees anything about Phil Gramm in the news. The problems with de-regulation aren’t de-regulation but state officials who think “de-regulation” means “anything goes”.

Read it.

And if Obama had lost, how would they have characterized the riots that were threatened? If you run an explicitly racist campaign, people respond accordingly.

The election of a black president triggered at least 200 hate-related incidents, a watchdog group finds.

In a country of 300 million. The term “statistically insignificant” leaps to mind.

Read it.

But he said a carrier fleet would only be used for defence, unlike that of “another country”.

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

Read it.

Well, if you’re serious about bacon….

George Will points to an inconvenient truth.

The distribution of a trillion dollars by a political institution — the federal government — will be nonpolitical? How could it be? Either markets allocate resources, or government — meaning politics — allocates them. Now that distrust of markets is high, Americans are supposed to believe that the institution they trust least — Congress — will pony up $1 trillion and then passively recede, never putting its 10 thumbs, like a manic Jack Horner, into the pie? Surely Congress will direct the executive branch to show compassion for this, that and the other industry. And it will mandate “socially responsible” spending — an infinitely elastic term — by the favored companies.

Thomas Sowell takes a look at our modern Brahmin caste and their claims to authority.

Intellectuals, according to Mr. Kristof, are people who are “interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity,” people who “read the classics.”

It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

During the 1930s, some of America’s leading intellectuals condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model – all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large food exporter.

In the 1930s, it was the intellectuals who pooh-poohed the dangers from the rise of Adolf Hitler and urged Western disarmament.

Read it.

Read it.

Among the full roster of about 150 staff members being assigned to government agencies between now and Inauguration Day are dozens of former lobbyists and some who were registered as recently as this year. Many more are executives and partners at firms that pay lobbyists, and former government officials who work as consultants or advisers to those seeking influence.

Change you can believe in.

Not.

Read it.

That’s right. According to WaPo, the American people are just too darn stupid or absent-minded to stop themselves from rushing down to their local dealership and buying the largest, most gas-sucking SUV on the lot. Never mind that you’re trying to figure out how to pay the heating bill for the winter ahead, the editors of the Washington Post just know that deep down inside, you have an irresistible compulsion to go into more even debt for the next 72 months to finance a new energy-inefficient vehicle.

Read it.

When people are spending their own money they seek value for every penny and they keep an eye on things. The businesses they deal with know they have to provide a good service or the customers will go elsewhere. The more goods and services that are subject to those market pressures, the better the quality of what is provided and the better the value for money. It has long surprised me that some people call for government to nationalise businesses and run them “for the people”. After all, who would you trust more to provide groceries of good quality at a good price, the government or Tesco? Tesco makes huge profits whilst delivering excellent value for money, it is the best possible evidence that profit is a good thing not a burden.

Read it.

Some professors responded too much to financial incentives for the university’s liking.

Nope, can’t have that.

Read it.

Somebody call AlGore and give him the bad news.

The Hog looks at the King James Version and draws conclusions.

Most Americans are illiterate by the standards of a century ago. The things high school graduates wrote back then outshine typical writing produced by modern college graduates. That is no exaggeration. I’ve seen the garbage lawyers write these days, and I’ve seen letters uneducated people wrote long ago. The lawyers lose.

Read it.

The increasing reversion of international society into an economic caste system proceeds apace.

The foyers of hotels across the city – from the Four Seasons to the Park Hyatt – resemble the United Nations in full session, with ordinary guests pushed out of the way to make way for delegations from around the world.

An email from First Lady Laura Bush’s office detailed the lavish menu. Leaders feasted first on fruitwood-smoked quail with quince gastrique, followed by thyme-roasted rack of lamb with an aubergine fondue.

Jerry Pournelle has been thinking about politics longer than I’ve been alive.

The Republican Party has fallen victim to Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy. The Iron Law states that in every organization there will be two factions. One will be dedicated to the goals of the organization> Examples are dedicated class room teachers in teacher unions, the Old Guard members of the Sierra Club from the days when you could not join the Sierra Club unless you had been backpacking in the High Sierra, etc.; we all know such people. The other faction will be dedicated to the organization itself without any regard to the organization’s actual reason for existence. Examples are teacher’s union officials, many administrators, the current management of the Sierra Club, etc..; we all know those people, too. Pournelle’s Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization.

Read it.

… it’s an unintended consequence of the decision by the federal government to mandate a nationwide 55mph speed limit back in 1974. Setting such an artificially low speed limited basically made people realize that speed limits had little, if any, relationship to actual safety regulations, and felt more comfortable trusting their own judgment in terms of what speed was safe for driving.

Read it.

Read it.

Me want.

Read it.

Oh, ya think?

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Another fine illustration of the general truth that government is far more often the problem than the solution.

Read it.

Muslims lie? Who knew?

Welcome to the show, Barack.

Read it.

There’s a very clever Country song in there struggling to get out….

Read it.

And now, for something completely different….

Read it.

Darwin award nominee.

Read it.

And about bloody time, too.

Steve Sailer. Need I say more?

Christopher Hitchens takes a hard look at the Obama Nation.

Read it.

The Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. … It is time for a sale.  Selling even some western land could raise hundreds of billions of dollars – perhaps trillions of dollars – for the Federal government at a time when the funds are badly needed and no one want to raise taxes.  At the same time, a sale of western land would improve the efficiency of land allocation.

Read it.

Spain is embroiled in a deepening row over an expensive artwork at the UN headquarters in Geneva that is being paid for by Spanish taxpayers from the overseas aid budget.

Hey, wasting money is what the U.N. do best. Spending taxpayer money on useless shit is what Socialist governments do best. Why complain about this brilliant intersection of core competencies?

Read it.

I’ll bet it works really well on no-longer-needed bodies.

“And what do you do, Mr Soprano?”

“Waste managment consultant.”

Turn on the lights, and make Jimmy Hoffa more useful than he ever dreamed of being.

Read it.

Boy, there’s a British name for you.

Read it.

Better pay that Social Security tax.

Read it.