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A stimulus they can believe in.

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Sandhurst military academy has dropped the Church of England Creed from services over fears that it may offend religious minorities.

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Look at Britain today, and see where we will be after four years of Obama.

The Australian Prime Minister is a prima facie idiot:

KEVIN RUDD has denounced the unfettered capitalism of the past three decades and called for a new era of “social capitalism” in which government intervention and regulation feature heavily.

Anybody who thinks that during the past three decades “unfettered capitalism” could be found anywhere in the world ought not to be allowed out without adult supervision.

David Friedman discusses the strategic implications of picking the right name.

A well chosen name wins an argument by assuming its conclusion. Label cash subsidies to foreign government as “foreign aid” and who can be so hard hearted as to oppose them. Call subsidies to the public schools “aid to education” and you neatly skip over the question of whether additional spending in the public school system results in more education. Label something “pollution” and is no longer necessary to offer evidence that it is bad, since everyone knows pollution is bad—even thermal pollution, otherwise described as warm water. Occasionally we even get dueling names. Both “right to life” and “pro-choice” are obviously good things; how could anyone be against either?

Of course, only stupid people are deceived by this practice; but, since that’s at least half the population, it’s important.

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Manipulate the market? Why would they want to do that?

Notice that the Obamessiah isn’t doing anything about oil market manipulation; he’s too busy trying to get his Porkulus bill through Congress.

Jerry Pournelle tells an inconvenient truth.

I believe that the worst threat to the future of the United States is a continuing trend: we are not properly educating the brightest 25% of our young people, and that will being about disaster; while our failure to teach relevant skills to the below average children contributes to the coming disaster. A nation of uneducated bright people coupled with a large part of the population who haven’t been taught to do anything and thus are not only pretty well useless but know it can lead to a number of scenarios, few of them pleasant. And that, I put it to you, is where we are now, and those who continue to promote the idea that every child deserves a world class university prep education is an enemy of the Republic.

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Initially designed for children of working-poor families, this new Super-Schip will be double in size, and even kids whose parents make $65,000 a year will be eligible. The program will also now cover pregnant women and automatically enroll their new arrivals. The Congressional Budget Office estimates 2.4 million individuals will drop their private coverage for the public program.

Under “stimulus,” Medicaid is now on offer not to just poor Americans, but Americans who have lost their jobs. And not just Americans who have lost their jobs, but their spouses and their children. And not Americans who recently lost their jobs, but those who lost jobs, say, early last year. And not just Americans who already lost their jobs, but those who will lose their jobs up to 2011. The federal government is graciously footing the whole bill. The legislation also forbids states to apply income tests in most cases.

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Considering the train wreck that is the British police, I can’t blame them.

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Simon Heffer wonders how a young man who is illiterate could have gained seven GCSEs.

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Removing apostrophes from road signs will cause “utter chaos”, the Apostrophe Protection Society has warned.

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Can you blame them? Fortunately America isn’t in the same boat as Britain; the government doesn’t totally control the educational system. We don’t have a bullshit “National Curriculum” and we don’t have a set of government tests to determine whether people have achieved a secondary school education. It is not, however, for lack of trying on the part of education unions and “progressives”.

Read it.

Pass the popcorn.

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For those pondering a career change.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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So it will be the same crappy service, but this time it will be legitimate.

Yeah, that’s an improvement.

Repeal the Private Express Statutes and let FedEx and UPS get a shot at it.

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Robert Matthews, who retired as Chief Assayer of the Royal Mint in 2002, said: “If the public starts losing confidence in coins and notes, you get people refusing to take them.

I have a question: Who would care? It’s not as if the coins (or notes) have any intrinsic value. If people can’t tell the difference between the “real” ones and the “fake” ones, the only people to whom it could possibly matter are government bureaucrats.

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The five-year-old boy and his four-year-old sister were being cared for by their grandparents because their mother, a recovering heroin addict, was not considered capable.

But social workers stepped in to remove the children from their care because of concerns about their age, despite the grandmother being just 46 and the grandfather 59.

The couple only found out last week that two homosexual men would be adopting the children in the next few weeks, and said that when they objected they were warned they may never see them again.

I suppose it’s only a coincidence that “1984” was set in Britain.

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I suspect that the Illuminati are somehow involved.

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Or, God help us, LeRoy or DeShawn.

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… is getting very little attention — which is a pity, because it’s the best alternative.

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Of course, they’re not hiring now, either.

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India is a natural ally in the struggle against the Great Jihad, because it has been on the receiving end of the greatest abominations ever dealt out to the infidels by Islam. It has the world’s largest Muslim minority — somewhere between 140 and 165 million followers of the Prophet, depending on whose figures you use — and experiences horrific Muslim terrorist attacks almost daily, of which the recent Mumbai atrocity is simply the most well-known.

Read it.

You know you want one.

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Pardon me while I barf.

“When they think of Sailors, they think of crackerjacks, white hats and neckerchiefs,” said West. “Seeing Sailors in a camouflage uniform is going to take some getting used to. It’s up to us to make sure that when they do see us, we’re wearing the NWU the way it was intended to be worn.”

Yeah, it’s really important to blend in with the various shades of grey paint on a ship — who knows when an insurgent might pop out of an air vent.

The Navy went through this bullshit under Zumwalt, and eventually got over it — at the cost of millions and millions of dollars, not only taxpayer dollars but also dollars from the enlisted people who can least afford it. I wonder how many years and millions this latest insanity will last?

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Gee, I wonder which religion will be the first to hit the publishers with death threats?

I just wonder.

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*sigh* The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

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

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You refine heroin for a living, but you have a moral objection to beer.

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

Megan McArdle has some interesting thoughts on the Porkout.

It is very obvious, now that we have the stimulus plans, that the Democrats are using stimulus as an excuse to spend money on things they want to spend money on.  Their demand for things like alternative energy programs is inelastic; it’s just that it happens, right now, to be convenient to bill them as stimulus.

Read it.

Don’t say we never have useful information here.

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As the nation’s drug war rages on, with its weekly tallies of headless torsos, it is getting harder to produce a shock wave in the Mexican media. But the gruesome recipes of “The Stewmaker” have gripped public attention here, as authorities describe how a “disposal expert” working for a Tijuana drug cartel boss allegedly got rid of hundreds of bodies by dissolving the corpses in vats of acid.

Yeah, we want more of those people in this country.

Read it.

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Fooled me.

Read it.

Perhaps by coincidence, or perhaps not, Alcatraz is in the constituency of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives and a vocal liberal opponent of Guantanamo.

I like it. It has texture, and scope.

Steve Sailer nails it yet again.

Portland, Oregon is, of course, near the top of any list of Stuff White People Like. It has it all: environmental restrictions on suburban development, trams, liberal social attitudes, bicycle trails, awareness, an upscale population, microbreweries, sterility, and so much more. Not surprisingly, white people like Portland. In fact, it was the only city in the country where reporter Jonathan Tilove found, while researching his book The View from Martin Luther King Drive, that white gentrifiers were driving blacks away from the local MLK Drive. Similarly, it’s one of the few cities in the country with a growing population of Reform/Conservative Jews.

Nonwhites, eh … not so much.

Read it.

Then I change Ted Kennedy into the jackal that reflects his inner truth.

I’m looking forward to it.

Read it.

Apparently the Obama Nation may include a bunch of freeloading relatives. Africans are apparently a lot like Arabs that way.

Read it.

Deaf people could one day have their hearing restored through a ground-breaking gene therapy technique, scientists reported yesterday.

They showed that they can trigger the growth of new hair cells in the inner ear that are crucial to hearing as they pick up sound vibrations.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Funny how Obama personally presiding over the giving away of $100,000,000 or so to improve Chicago school performance as chairman of the Annenberg Chicago Challenge didn’t do a damn thing for the test scores of Chicago black students, but his ascent to supreme power, his wonders doth work.

Funny indeed.

Read it.

With great power comes great bureaucracy.

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Hamas is a bully aided by a bigger bully, Iran. And, just as strident and threatening human bullies get away with their aggression so long as no one calls their bluff, so Hamas has been getting away with murder and torture because the UN and many states won’t call its two-faced self-portrayal as the victim in the piece. In the struggle to take over Gaza from Fatah, it went on a rampage that killed hundreds of Palestinians. Even during this most recent assault, in early January, it executed Fatah members for violating their house arrest. A few weeks ago, Hamas determined to hurt yet more of its compatriots by introducing Islamic hudud punishments to the Strip, from amputations and stonings, to crucifixions and hangings.

Read it.

A German scholar of ancient languages takes a new look at the sacred book of Islam. He maintains that it was created by Syro-Aramaic speaking Christians, in order to evangelize the Arabs. And he translates it in a new way.

Like Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, I find fascinating the stories about how various sacred books aren’t what they seem.

On the other hand, bear in mind that St John Damascene, who worked as a bureaucrat for the Caliph in the 8th century, discussed Islam as if it were a Christian heresy; and presumably he knew more about it than we do.

Read it.

The District of Columbia has the third-largest downtown in the U.S., ranking only behind New York and Chicago. More than 10 million square feet of commercial office space was added to the District between 1996 and 2005, with another 10 million having been brought on-line or underway since then. Additionally, geographic areas that in the 1960s were entirely rural farmland – such as Tysons Corner, VA, and Gaithersburg, Maryland – have grown so fast that they are today unrecognizable. For example, Tysons Corner has over 46 million square feet of office and retail space, and a daytime population of over 100,000. The Washington metropolitan area is the eight largest market in the country – and comprises the fifth largest market when combined with the Baltimore metro area – with a 2007 population of over 5.3 million people, yet almost nothing is manufactured here. It makes one wonder exactly how many people are required to properly rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Read it.

Put a 50-cal on that puppy and I’m in.