Bryan Caplan is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

In hindsight, I’m amazed that people who don’t think twice about killing conscripts (or even civilians) are so reluctant to justify violence against serial killer statesmen.  What could be less objectionable than trying to stop mass murder by killing the specific individuals most responsible for it?

Actually, come to think of it, it’s not really a hard question at all. The hard question is, What are these numbwits thinking that are so opposed to terminating psychopaths like bin Laden, Assad, Chavez, Morales, and Achmedinijad? It goes beyond stupid.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

And yet, when you think about it, like medieval noblemen, they really don’t have to be, do they?

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Well, actually the Anglican tradition of being a Christian-themed Cargo Cult.

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And about time, too.

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And, to the best of my knowledge, the only people who give a shit can be numbered on one hand.

Guys, get a life.

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“Of gods we believe, and of men we know, that those who have power will exercise it.”

The law clearly gives him the right to appoint somebody to the vacant Senate seat. Absent any evidence that the appointment is corrupt, this is a blatant and illegitimate power-play by the Senate Democrats.

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If the smell is so bad that even the Washington Post can tell, then it must be really bad.

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A timely reminder that insanity is no bar to elective office.

Israelis: Doing jobs that Americans won’t do.

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No more Bush to bash, apparently. We won, so it isn’t news any more.

Once upon a time, we had journalists. Those were the days.

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

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To tell the truth — most of them, it wouldn’t help.

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Can you say “Darwin Award”? I knew you could.

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You knew it had to happen.

Hey, hamsters are cheaper than Arabs — and they don’t blow shit up.

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1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Nothing else.

The Hog is history.

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1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. (What am I saying? It’s already happening here….)

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Bear in mind that a “massacre” is what occurs when one or more Palestinians are killed by Israelis. When a suicide bomber blows up dozens of Jews, or a Qassam rocket drops into a school, that’s not a massacre. It’s an act of random vandalism, or a criminal matter to be investigated by the appropriate authorities, or justifiable resistance against illegal occupation by a foreign power, or an understandable reaction to decades of apartheid oppression.

Take your pick. But, unless Palestinians are dead, it’s not a massacre.

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I say we go them one better, and feed the entire family to the shark. I’m sure they would want it that way.

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I was only mildly suprised, a few weeks ago, when I found ABC News peddling a fake video Q&A with President Bush, in which segments of his answers to two different questions were spliced together, out of order and out of context, with no indication that this surgery had been performed (“In president, out president, fake president”, 12/5/2008). Perhaps I should have been more indignant, but I’ve learned not to expect much in the way of journalistic ethics from broadcast news organizations.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

And I accepted, years ago, that even first-rank newspapers like the New York Times routinely fabricate virtual quotations in textual form, by splicing together out-of-context fragments from widely separated parts of an interview.

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

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It can be done.

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Of course not, they’re needed to provide victims for propaganda purposes.

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Further evidence that legalizing recreational drugs isn’t the cure-all that some arrested adolescents would have you believe.

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Well, that depends on which God you have. Nigeria and Sudan have a lot of Muslims who “have God”, and I can’t say that it helps a whole lot.

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Government administrators in charge of an almost $6 billion cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay tried to conceal for years that their effort was failing — even issuing reports overstating their progress — to preserve the flow of federal and state money to the project, former officials say.

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

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Government states that government is in the business of hiring and paying government workers, whatever its formal business may be.

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Note that they never “call for ceasefire” during the continual bombardment of Israel by rockets and mortar shells coming from Gaza and Lebanon. Guess they do learn from experience after all.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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Much like attracting the attention of a taxing authority.

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Bet he’s a Democrat. Sounds like something a Democrat would do.

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Jerry Pournelle waxes dyspeptic.

Government can protect some people from bad guys. It doesn’t always do that and never does it perfectly, but it can, sometimes, do that.  It can, sometimes, as Adam Smith notes, undertake projects that have great benefit to all with little benefit to any one person — he had in mind roads and canals and fire departments, not the over-all direction of the economy. Alas, it doesn’t take a lot of bad thinking to expand that list, and everyone does. After all, if we can put a man on the moon, surely we can give every child a world class university prep education, can’t we? Not just in the United States, but everywhere. And guess what: all the university professors, both tenured and wannabe, agree completely, and rub their hands in anticipation — since of course they won’t be paid by those who will benefit from universal university education, but by the taxpayers who won’t be asked what they think about having everyone go to university and get a degree if they want to become a manager at Jack In The Box. The largest joke is that even the taxpayers can’t pony up enough, and everyone who goes to these overpaid institutions will get to pony up a grand a month for the rest of their lives; this in exchange for the pretended education they get in order to get the credentials that prove they are educated and worthy of having a job. Of course that credential can lead to one of the coveted positions among the governing class.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

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She’s the closest we’ve got to a Heinlein Girl in politics today. What’s not to like?

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Darwin Award nominees.

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Suggest to Jews that they ought to invite a Storm Trooper to Hannukah and see where it gets you. Or put Simon Legree in a Kwanzaa scene.

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Note that nowhere on the entire first page of the article does it mention the word “annulment” or explain what the legal issue is.

We used to have journalists. Ah, those were the days.

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One of the things to think about as you read this article is that some of the criticism it contains — an objection to the commercialization and excessive materialism that has come to be associated with Christmas — is not specifically Muslim. It’s a reminder of why Islam appeals to people who are repelled by the hedonistic sinkhole that Western popular culture has become.

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Well. There it is.

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Sean McMeekin details the staggering thievery of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Not really news, but a useful reminder. Leftoid are distributionsists; they don’t produce anything, they just re-distribute (“steal”) what others produce.

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Why should the tribulations of distant strangers be as important as those of people near and dear to us? What requires us to care about the sufferings of faraway people whom we will never meet?

The answer is obvious: Nothing.

Neither evolutionary biology, nor tradition, nor common sense would dictate any concern for distant peoples with whom we share neither kinship, language, nor customs.

The imperative to empathize with distant alien peoples is an artifact of our times, a product of the strange and inverted moral structure that has emerged out of the wreckage of the twentieth century.

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Funny, he doesn’t look Jewish.

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Not really news to those of us who have been paying attention, but a good pat on the back for the conspiracy theorists. Now maybe they’ll look for an unedited copy of the Zapruder film.

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Thus, we have two situations which ethics underpin, yet the current wisdom claims both are beyond the reach of ethics. It seems as though we are repeatedly hit in the face by the swinging doors of unintended consequences wherever we turn. We can see the results very clearly in these two areas: abortions and markets. Both of them proclaimed to be ethics-free and both of them riddled with problems no one foresaw. Or at least no one was listening to those who did foresee and tried to warn us.

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The moving finger writes, and having written moves on….

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We have the technology. And there’s probably a gene somewhere for that.

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This is news? What have they been doing for the past twenty years?

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The solution proposed by researchers such as Harvard’s Thomas J. Kane and Dartmouth’s Douglas Staiger is not to raise teacher qualifications but to lower them—hiring “anyone with a pulse and a college degree,” Mr. Gladwell says—and then impose a rigorous yet flexible system of assessing new teachers in the classroom and weeding out the bad ones. That would mean adjusting teacher salary scales and ending automatic tenure, among other sweeping changes in the profession.

An idea so absurd that only an intellectual could believe it. We’re already doing the first part and the second part won’t ever happen while we have (a) Democrats and (b) education unions. Bzzt! Thank you for plaing.