Read it.

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

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Read it.

I suspect that they will find it much changed.

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Oh, but who are we to judge their authentic foreign culture, so much more real than our own? Who are we to impose our bourgeois Western values on an ancient civilization? Does diversity mean nothing these days?

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This is God telling you not to eat raw fish. Wisdom. Attend.

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And I have no problem with that. After all, who are we to criticize this authentic Iraqi culture?

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Our bad.

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Recycling is one of the bedrocks of the environmentalist religion. Every local council exhorts us to sort out paper from metal from plastic from glass and put them each in different bins so they can be taken away and turned into something else, failure to do so can result in hefty financial penalties and being named and shamed as a murderer of fluffy seal pups. The problem I have with the religious fad for recycling is that it conflates two distinctly separate points and, at least to some degree, can do more harm than good.

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Perhaps we actually do have the technology.

What’s more, according to the same computer simulations, the cumulative effect of thousands of years of human influence on climate is preventing the world from entering a new glacial age, altering a clockwork rhythm of periodic cooling of the planet that extends back more than a million years.

Of course, all this flatulance about Global Warming is based on computer simulations, too, so don’t get your hopes up.

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Be the first on your block….

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“The way we envision it is, there would be a bunch of these sent out in a swarm,” said Greg Parker, who helps lead the research project at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton. “If we know there’s a possibility of bad guys in a certain building, how do we find out? We think this would fill that void.”

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Two words: Engergy density. But read the whole thing.

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Well, I guess the Japanese do these things differently.

There is no life after work, anyway.

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What family doesn’t have its ups and downs?

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Relatives are “outraged” and plan to sue the city, said John Lemieux, their lawyer.

Of course.

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Clive Crook doesn’t have a lot of affectoin for Malcolm Gladwell.

Since the first chapter of “Tipping Point” I have been enduring Gladwell out of an increasingly weary sense of professional obligation. This is what they pay me to do, I tell myself. The man has a nose for interesting tales, I grant you, but his unfailing combination of intellectual parasitism, credulity, false modesty, and self-importance repels me.

And he’s no fan of David Brooks, either.

For this premature outburst, blame David Brooks. “Outliers” is an “important” book, he says, in an excess of professional courtesy. (Important to whom?) Further compliments follow. In the end he criticises a little, but quite respectfully. I see no blood on the floor. It’s disappointing.

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This is the sort of crap that causes people to move to America.

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Read it.

Read it.

The levy is a sort of “you’re a criminal tax” that assumes blank CDs are going to be used for unauthorized copying. Blank CDs in Canada are now often more expensive than blank DVDs (which have no levy and hold more data), and most of that cost goes directly to the record industry.

Such corporatism is characteristic of socialist states — like Canada.

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So all the thief needs is your finger, not your whole body. And, to be safe, he’ll need all ten, since he won’t know which one it’s set to.

Thanks a bunch, guys.

Baron Bodissey expresses an Eternal Truth.

Other powerful nations don’t expect gratitude. You’ll never catch the Russians or the Chinese asking for gratitude from their neighbors. Britain may have done a service to India by colonizing it, but the British did not expect gratitude from their colonial subjects. Unlike the United States, these empires acted (or act) as empires, that is, in their own interests. Their foreign policy is not based on altruism, so gratitude is never an issue.

Within six months or two years or five years from when the United States finally withdraws its military forces from Iraq, the Iraqis will either revert to their customary ways and install a strongman in power, resort to civil war, or become an Islamic theocracy like Iran. The only way we can prevent such an outcome is to occupy the country for decades — or pave it over.

And, no matter what happens, gratitude will never be forthcoming. Expecting it is utter foolishness.

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The British respect tradition, yes they do.

Read it.

Watch it.

The Red Army Kittens get into the spirit of the season.

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California — the gift that keeps on giving.

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Mr Hecht did some overlay work, and came up with this remarkable fit: “The divide between the (more free-market) PO and the (more populist) PiS almost exactly follows the old border between Imperial Germany and Imperial Russia, as it ran through Poland! How about that for a long-lasting cultural heritage?!?” How about: amazing, bordering on the unbelievable?

History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme.

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Read it.

Nery Clark was dismissed on the spot after she tried to get £5 off a grocery bill at the shop where she had worked for 11 years.

When the mother-of-four came home to tell her husband the news, he suffered a heart attack and died instantly.

Marks & Spencer insists Mrs Clark knew she was not supposed to use the discount card on her day off and says it was right to sack her.

Merry Christmas.

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Well, socialized medicine is like that. Canada has the same problem. With a single-payer system, unless that single payer has unlimited resources (and, popular mythology to the contrary notwithstanding, the government doesn’t), you’ll get rationing.

Well, how prepared were they? Read it an find out.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

A physics professor my wife knows complains that few of his students have any idea of how to do plausibility calculations, how to figure out whether quantitative claims could be true. My wife suggests that it would be a good topic for a class in elementary school, since such calculations usually require nothing more than arithmetic and demonstrate one reason why arithmetic is useful. It occurs to me that it might also be a good topic for a book.

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Well, they do things differently in Britain, don’t you know.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

Welcome to Londonistan.

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

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You never know when one of these babies can save your life.

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It is sad but true that Jeremiah Wright was Barack Obama’s long-time pastor at the Trinity United Church. Obama admired his wit and wisdom, citing one of his sermons as a turning point in his life in Dreams From My Father and drawing the title of The Audacity of Hope from the same sermon. He had a long and close relationship with him until earlier this year when it became politically inconvenient.

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Two words: Lethal Injection.

Or we could give him to Planned Parenthood — in an era where the overriding value is to Make Every Child A Wanted Child, killing those that aren’t wanted … well, I doubt seriously that anybody wants this child.

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But not enough to do anything serious about preventing these people from coming into the United States. That would be bigoted and insensitive.

Many people, too, are afraid of the kidnapping crews, which no longer limit their targets to the super-rich, and travel in armored cars and with bodyguards. Kidnappers now snatch middle-class and even poor victims, demanding as little as $500 in ransom for their return.

This year, the 14-year-old son of sporting goods magnate Alejandro Martí was kidnapped and killed. His body was found rotting in the trunk of a car. Authorities suspect a federal police officer was involved in the abduction.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Here’s an interesting question: How many other Ponzi schemes and similar frauds of which we are as of yet unaware have managed to survive so far due to the trillions of bailout dollars handed out?

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But what is this “democracy” that everyone talks about? We all have a general idea about it: the ballot box, the purple fingers, a legislature composed of the people’s elected representatives, and so on. But, strictly speaking, democracy is just one form of representative government, and possibly the worst. Other, sturdier forms include the constitutional republic and the constitutional monarchy, both of which have long and distinguished pedigrees.

Most people instinctively disdain any constitutional provisions that run counter to popular opinion. But they overlook an unpleasant and dangerous truth: unconstrained democracy leads inevitably to tyranny.

There are no exceptions. If democracy is not hedged around with safeguards to check the venal and capricious expressions of the popular will, then tyranny will eventually be voted into existence.

Jonah Goldberg once wrote, “Democracy is a system under which 51% of the population can pee in the soup of the other 49%.” And that sums up the essential nature of democracy better than anything else.

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John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, does what he does best.

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When Political Correctness comes up against reality, reality always wins, because reality is self-supporting.

Darwin Award nominee.

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Because people are stupid and seldom think things through? That’s just a guess, mind.

I guess I’d rather give my money to people who are going to use it to try to make more money (i.e. save/spend it in the market system) than give it to people who are going to use it to try and get re-elected.

Yah, sure, you betcha. Wake me up when that actually happens.

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Gotta love that Global Warming.

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With Mencius Moldbug, I’m holding out for the Prince of Liechtenstein.

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Those are certainly my priorities.