Read it.

It sounds stupid but it’s actually pretty cool.

Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal points out that the Stimulus Bill is mostly stimulating the government.

Read it.

Must be pretty gross if even the U.N. noticed.

Read it.

Under international law, unlawful combatants (like pirates) can be disposed of upon capture. Let’s do that.

Read it.

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

Personally, I’d rather have cancer than eat soy, but that’s just me.

Read it.

Read it.

The thing I’ve always wondered about concerning fancy-pants cars with pop-up doors: How do you get out of them in the rain without flooding the interior of the car?

Read it.

Read it.

Steve Sailer has some advice for those thinking about a career change.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Read it.

Or just your poopsie-woopsie, depending on how the numbers come out.

Read it.

What’s the Arabic for “We’ve got more money than we need, let’s play around.”?

Read it.

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

The ratio of sodium to potassium in urine is more important than the level of sodium alone for cardiovascular disease risk.

Take whatever action you consider appropriate.

Read it.

You know you want one.

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This is why lobbyists exist, and make so much money: They can get the government to pass a law that means big bucks for them. (And you thought ethanol was about the environment! Foolish mortal!)

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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

Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

Darwin award.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Okay, he’s got the “Bill Clinton” level; can he make it to “Jimmy Carter”? Stay tuned.

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Read it.

Read it.

Good.

The clashes began when protesters hurled bottles of rancid butter and paint onto the decks of one of the vessels from inflatable boats.

“Mommeeee! Johnny hit me back!“

Read it,

Me want.

Watch it.

A truly epic struggle between good and evil.

Read it.

Come, little piggies, gather ’round the trough.

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Guess That Party: Note that Voinovich is immediately tagged as a Republican, but nowhere will you see any mention of the fact that White was a Democrat, thus avoiding the obvious conclusion to be drawn from the fact that the city improved under Republican administration and then collapsed under Democrat administration.

Voinovich is also one of the most notorious RINOs in the history of the state of Ohio, so calling him “tough-minded” says more about the author than the subject.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Read it.

If that’s a recession, I’d like to see what a boom is like. (Reminds me the story about the African who is reported to have said, “I want to come to America and see a country where the poor people are fat.”)

Read it.

Hey, a country has to have its priorities.

Read it.

Gotta love that Global Warming.

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Invented by an American, of course.

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A search of the Bulgarian-registered lorry revealed the nine Eritreans and one Afghan hidden in the load of wheelie bins.

I guess that, no matter how bad it gets in Britain, other places are worse.

Read it.

The wage of sin is death.

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Can you blame them?

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Don’t think of it as selling out; think of it as buying in.

Senators fetch the best prices, after all.

Read it.

The Hog has been foaming at the mouth about Pajamas Media (chiefly notable for its connection to Glenn Harland Reynolds, The Instapundit) for years, and I never could figure out how this was important. This is an entertaining take on recent events, if anybody’s interested.

Read it.

Recessions are a good thing, from the point of view of a dog in the manger.

Read it.

The Democratic Party is of the intellectual rich, not of the worker, and not very inclined to deep change. The most critical political story of the election was the 12 to 15 percent shift of the rich, educated and suburban to the Democrats, offsetting the shift of about 6 percent of the less educated or professional, but more religious and rural to the Republicans.

A sharp observation. Unfortunately, as with many academics opining outside of their field, it is followed by a stupid conclusion:

By far the greatest issue before us, one barely on anyone’s agenda, is the astounding degree of economic inequality, perhaps approaching the levels of 1929 or even 1913. This obscene outcome, an astounding concentration of wealth by the super-rich, is a consequence of market failure – the capacity of those at the top to exercise monopoly power over the economy, and whose tax cuts and deregulation contributed to the current financial crisis and deepening recession.

1. “barely on anyone’s agenda”? The left has been whining about this for as long as I’ve been reading newspapers.

2. Economic inequality is “obscene” only if you’re reasoning from the a priori position that there is some mandate either in morality or natural law for economic equality.

3. The “astounding concentration of wealth by the super-rich” is a result of modern technological progress that produces a “winner take all” culture (why, there’s even a book by that name that explains it very well) as markets widen and there is more room for good products and services to drive out less good products and services.

4. None of this is a “market failure” unless you consider the market to be a mechanism to produce the result you want rather than the result that it actually produces. Hint: The market doesn’t care what you want. It works when willing buyers and sellers get together; the only “market failure” is when nannyists in government use their coercive power to meddle, and that’s not the fault of the market.

5. The “capacity of those at the top to exercise monopoly power” is soley the fault of the government; only the government can produce a true monopoly, and it does so by interfering with the market. That’s why lobbyists make the riches that they do — when legislators and bureaucrats determine what can be bought and sold, the first thing to be bought and sold will be legislators.

6. “Tax cuts and deregulation” didn’t contribute at all to the current economic crisis, as anybody who has been paying attention and has two brain cells to rub together would realize. It was produced by governmental agencies and quasi-agencies meddling in the housing and financial markets in a vain attempt to achieve politically fashionable ends. The market works whether you want it to or not; try to mess with it, and it will bite you in the ass every time.

Read it.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

Slap a 50-cal mount on that puppy, and I’m there.

Read it.

Speed the day.

Read it. The link is just for reference; the article is important enough to post complete.

Clark Coleman writes:

I have been looking back on the Islamic attacks upon freedom of speech and freedom of the press, as in the Danish cartoon controversy, trying to categorize the various responses of liberals and conservatives. It seem that there are five response categories to the worrisome behavior of Muslims in the West:

1. Recognize that Muslims can never assimilate Western values, because Western values are incompatible with Islam, and propose that we change our immigration quotas immediately to stop adding Muslims to the West, as well as taking other measures to make potential jihadists feel unwelcome and self-deport.

2. Bitch and moan and whine about growing Muslim power and friction in the West while proposing no solution.

3. Fantasize that we can “assimilate” Muslims so that they internalize Western values, which implies that we know how to take people who have never, in 1400 years, respected our ideas of freedom and transform them into people who no longer pay attention to the official sharia positions on such things as the Danish cartoons and ignore public expressions that they consider blasphemy.

4. Deny or ignore that there is really any problem in the first place, calling the cartoon riots “isolated incidents” that we should not “overreact” to, etc.

5. Realize that there is cultural incompatibility between Muslims and the West, but consciously choose openness liberalism [meaning, being open and inclusive to all people regardless of how different they are to you] over natural rights liberalism [meaning, admitting only people who subscribe to the rights of man], to refer back to Allan Bloom and previous VFR discussions, and accept all of the problems of having Muslims in our midst as simply the negative part of a trade-off. (Hence, no energy is spent whining about it, nor denying it.)

If (a huge “if”) conservatives and liberals respectively had a fundamental philosophical understanding of themselves, I would expect conservatives to choose position No. 1, and liberals/leftists to choose position No. 5. The sad truth is that most self-described conservatives and liberals fall across the spectrum of Nos. 2, 3, and 4, with the only thing distinguishing “conservatives” from “liberals” being that “conservatives” fall more towards No. 2 and “liberals” more towards No. 4.

Needless to say, I favor #1.