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This is a great idea. Would that they had it thirty years ago.

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Send ’em to D.C, tell ’em to shoot anything that moves.

This is moderately silly.

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I am not making this up.

These people are intactivists. As in, activists who want male genitalia kept intact. As in, people who want a federal ban on male circumcision for newborns.

Well, if you’ve got a preference, make it a federal ban. It’s all the rage.

How intactivists define circumcision: a cruel, traumatic and unnecessary surgery (the American Academy of Pediatrics says the benefits are not sufficient enough to recommend the procedure) that causes enduring sexual and psychological injury to a helpless infant who can’t give his consent.

How much of the medical community defines circumcision: a simple, nearly painless operation that removes an obsolete part of the body that can increase a man’s susceptibility to infections and sexually transmitted diseases (circumcision reduces the risk of getting HIV by 60 percent, studies show).

And of course those are absolutely of equal weight.

It is a sensitive issue. Pun absolutely intended.

Couldn’t have said it better myself….

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“Pork barrel! Get your pork barrel here!”

Should a bridge that would connect two campuses at Microsoft’s headquarters be funded with $11 million from the federal stimulus package?

Or maybe Bill Gates’ pocket change?

Marchione applied for federal stimulus money after costs jumped on the project from $25 million to $36 million. Marchione says the increase in costs were due to a rise in construction prices and because the bridge will be built on a diagonal in order to connect Microsoft’s original East campus with a newer West campus that are split by a public highway.

Sounds fishy to me.

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The nanny state advances apace.

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

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

A new Oberlin graduate, James Brennan, has his costly Eurail Pass backpack tour canceled by his parents because his alcoholic father’s executive career is wobbling. Suddenly needing a summer job to pay for tuition in the fall at the Columbia Journalism School, he finds that a resume featuring his SAT scores and his Renaissance Studies major doesn’t compensate for his lack of any work experience. Nobody in Greater Pittsburgh, it turns out, needs a fresco restored. He winds up at the employer of last resort, the Adventureland amusement park.

Writer-director Greg Mottola, who helmed 2007’s comedy hit “Superbad,” explains the origin of his quasi-autobiographical film with an ingenuous snobbishness that would have annoyed and amused John Steinbeck. “I was talking with a bunch of writer friends, and I was telling them these embarrassing stories about a summer in the ‘80s that I spent as a carnie working at an amusement park … It was the worst job I’ve ever had… I should have had a good job—I should have been a tutor or gone to Manhattan and been an intern at a magazine or something respectable …”

Please note that Mottola isn’t, personally, a jerk. Judging from “Adventureland,” he’s an insightful yet gentle observer. That’s just the way people think nowadays.

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

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I’m waiting for one to get in an accident and incinerate a city block when the hydrogen tank fails.

But of course a Segway is too dangerous to allow on the streets….

Authoress Lynn Viehl has some fun with hate mail.

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Perhaps something like this will be the Obamateurs next project.

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Indeed, there were lions in Britain as recently as a hundred years ago. Churchill appears to have been the last. Their descendants, however, are sadly shrunken.

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Now that’s comedy.

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This is a serious scam. Legacy Bank of Texas took my brother for over $400 this way. Be warned.

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Let’s get some popcorn while the PETA freaks fight it out with the anti-landmine fascists.

Steve Sailer likes to look for, you know, facts.

Is Maureen Dowd a racist? Let’s find out.

Obviously, Dowd (a red-haired Irish Catholic who felt undervalued because she has brown eyes) is using the code terms “blue eyed” and “white bread bankers” to refer to Northern European Protestants. So, it made more sense to look up ancestry, religion, and self-identification directly.

Well, first, Maureen Dowd’s media stereotype about the financial world as dominated by an Old Boy’s Network of blond, blue-eyed WASPs is badly out of date. Finance has evolved from an old Relationship Model to a newer Transaction Model about who can make you the most money in a New York minute.

Imagine my surprise. Maureen Dowd, famous liberal establishment columnist, seduced by media stereotypes? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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The Open University “snail hunt” is asking people to note down the appearance and number of banded snails found in gardens, parks, woodlands or even the street and submit the information via the internet.

Well, that will certainly be one of my top priorities today.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Qatar’s leader embraced Sudan’s president in a red-carpet welcome Sunday as he arrived to attend an Arab summit in his most brazen act of defiance against an international arrest warrant on charges of war crimes in Darfur.

Just another find day in the Dar al-Islam.

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Only in New York.

“NYU is an experimental community,” said Joshua Lawrence Becker, 21, a junior. “I bet student morale will plummet now that (Narnia) is gone.”

I have no doubt.

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I’ve been considering a request from a post-graduate student who wants to do a thesis on Islamophobia in Australia. She writes: “I am researching the topic Islamophobia, and I am trying to prove whether Islamophobia is based on religion fear or cultural fear of Islam.”

What about proving that Islamophobia exists at all? That would be the logical, ethical and scholarly starting point. But it appears the outcome has already been decided. This would fit the prevailing orthodoxy in academia that the default position for Muslims in Australia is victim. The jargon, “Islamophobia” is part of this ideological construct. Literally, it means fear of Muslims.

Let us rather say that “Islamophobia” isn’t as widespread as it ought to be. Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible; to fear such a system is utterly rational.

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Think of it as evolution in action.

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Well, they don’t have Democrats to deal with, as we do. Gives them an unfair advantage, it does.

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Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.

Steve Sailer cuts to the chase.

As I’ve mentioned before, many a female pundit’s output consists in large part of demands that society’s structures and values be revolutionized so that she, personally, will be considered hotter-looking.

That certainly explains Maureen Dowd.

Sorry, Maureen, but your nemesis, Catherine Zeta-Jones, is brown-eyed, so you can’t actually blame society’s prejudice against brown eyes for you not snagging Michael Douglas.

Ouch.

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A good explanation of why talking to Muslims will not stop their attempts to conquer the world.

In less than four centuries Christianity was able to win the Roman Empire over to itself. This happened from the bottom up, without force or violence, without government intervention or support. On the contrary, the government of the Roman Empire, by persecuting Christians from time to time, hindered Christianization with force and violence.

The Muslims managed to conquer roughly the same area as that of the ancient Roman Empire in about a century, with the exception of Western Europe, where they were stopped in France by Charles Martel (732), and with the exception of Turkey and the current Balkans, where the Muslims were stopped by the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantines, until the middle of the fifteenth century.

There is not a single Muslim who is unaware of this century of conquests. The military successes of that time are generally perceived by Islamic theologians as proof of the truth of Islam and the correctness of the statements made by Muhammad about himself and his mission. This century of conquest plays a major role in Islamic apologetics. If Islam were not God’s own religion, Muslims reason, and if Muhammad were not the messenger of God, they think, then these conquests would not have taken place and would not have been so successful. These conquests can be considered as akbar dalaala alla Sidq muHammad, “the best proof of the sincerity of Muhammad,” as a comment in the Qur’an at one point expresses it.

Those who wish to may apologize for the later Christian violence, even though their personal share in the mistakes that were committed during those centuries is small. Because of the “confession” that is part of the Christian liturgy, Christians are perhaps trained too well in the confession of guilt, and that contrasts with the views of most Muslims, who are in fact proud of the warfare of Islam against the Christians, and of the military triumphs that were achieved, at least in the early days. Later the balance of power changed in favor of Christianity. But we need to understand fully that the Muslims could have stayed at home in Medina. They did not do so; they marched out to battle. According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad settled in Medina in 622, and since then the Muslims have increasingly engaged their neighbors with the use of arms. Time and again, the Muslims declared war on their neighbors at the borders of their ever growing empire.

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Not really a surprise, but a useful reminder.

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Seems pretty obvious to me. For alleged linguists, the guys at Language Log oft times show astonishing ignorance of real languages and their history.

How many people start sentences (really: sentence fragments) with a conjunction (and, but)? Where did they pick that up? Well, how about from the Bible? St Paul does it all the time — not surprising, since that’s a standard grammatical feature of Greek — and most translators of the Bible kept the same structure, for “authenticity” (Word of God and all that, you know).

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Consumers who are trying them say they sometimes fail to work, or wear out early. At best, people discover that using the bulbs requires learning a long list of dos and don’ts.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

Made you look….

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Suppose a new president came to Washington and said, “I basically won’t change a thing. My motto is ‘Business as Usual.'” What kind of attention would that president get from lobbyists? Obviously, none. Campaign donations would drop precipitously. Corporations would lay off their lobbyists.

The opposite of that is a practice of keeping all the balls in the air, with massive regulation proposals in the works for all major industries. Massive financial system reform! Massive healthcare reform! Massive energy reform! This gets every lobbyist involved. It maximizes the shakedown.

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

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A former U.N. official who oversaw reconstruction funds in Afghanistan diverted half a million dollars from roads, schools and clinics to fund his luxury lifestyle, according to a confidential internal U.N. investigation.

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

Read it.

Just another fine day in the Dar al-Islam.

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A United States senator has introduced a bill that would bail out the nation’s newspaper industry, which has fallen on unprecedentedly hard times. It’s an idea that makes sense: given the symbiotic nature of the media and the current administration (and the permanent bureaucracy), nationalizing the newspapers is the perfect way to ensure that they do not lose their status as the monopoly mouthpiece for the leftist intelligentsia.

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Hint: One way or another, if the statists have their way, either by law or through taxation to support a National Health Service-type plan.

But some powerful Democrats have supported a mandate, including Hillary Clinton, Max Baucus (a key health-reform power broker in the Senate) and Tom Daschle (OK, maybe he’s not so powerful anymore).

The health insurance industry also backs a mandate. This is no surprise — the Health Blog would certainly back a mandate requiring all Americans to read health-related blogs. But we were reminded of the industry’s position again this morning, with the report that two health insurance trade groups wrote a letter to the Senate, offering to stop charging sick people more for coverage, provided that everyone is required to buy insurance.

Read it.

In the future, we’ll be able to power up our devices with a wave of the hand, a short walk or via our heartbeats, said engineers from the Georgia Institute of Technology on Thursday.

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The PC witch hunt against “hate speech” apparently trumps any right to free speech. Canada has fallen far.

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I have my doubts. Baking a Real Pizza takes at least 15 minutes; don’t see how you can make one from scratch AND COOK IT in three.

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Life imitates Art. We have the technology.

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Prediction: The only people who will try this will be lefty agitators like Ward Churchill and William Ayers who oughtn’t to be teaching anyway, and who will attempt to leverage the “radical street cred” thus gained to pressure faculties into granting tenure where it is otherwise not deserved.

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This would be amusing if it weren’t that it involved real people.

Welcome to the U.S.S.A.

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Or, at least, in the Real America that lives on the Left Coast.

Just as Apple ads reflect the Real America that lives in Cupertino.

Neither bears any resemblance to the Real America that lives in Dallas, Des Moines, Dulute, or Detroit.

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But to pretend to understand all the things you write about, and habitually to write about things you do not understand, is a very corrupting thing.

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American policymakers used to take bold action like that. Now they just sit and whine and wring their hands.

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A great asset for you newcomers.

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It’s so hard to get good help these days.

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I don’t think this is a episode of the Three Stooges, but you can never be sure with the British police.