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Like medieval priests, today’s carbon brokers will sell you an indulgence that forgives your carbon sins. It will run you about $500 for 5 tons of forgiveness—about how much the typical American needs every year. Or about $2,000 a year for a typical four-person household. Your broker will spend the money on such things as reducing methane emissions from hog farms in Brazil.

But if you really want to make a difference, you must send a check large enough to forgive the carbon emitted by four poor Brazilian households, too—because they’re not going to do it themselves. To cover all five households, then, send $4,000. And you probably forgot to send in a check last year, and you might forget again in the future, so you’d best make it an even $40,000, to take care of a decade right now. If you decline to write your own check while insisting that to save the world we must ditch the carbon, you are just burdening your already sooty soul with another ton of self-righteous hypocrisy. And you can’t possibly afford what it will cost to forgive that.

We rich people can’t stop the world’s 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can’t even make any durable dent in global emissions—because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we can do, if we’re foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and their carbon emissions faster still.

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Don’t you just want to be involved in that one?

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Now there’s a hole with no bottom….

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It is truly astonishing the number of ways in which we’ve improved the lives of mice and rats.

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During the course of a white person’s education they will go through many phases including but not limited to:  “awkward,”  “classic rock,” and “being really into a foreign country.”  Of these phases, there is only one  that all white people are required to go through before they can obtain their  bachelor’s degree. It is known as “Bob Marley.”

Under no circumstances should you ever bring a white person to a dancehall reggae concert,  it will frighten them.

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And subscribe to the RSS feed.

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Beware of birds with butts.

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You are what you eat.

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Well. Imagine that.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that there was a Hawaiian happy face spider.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Also, as my theory of Affordable Family Formation would predict, Santa Monica is famously liberal — e.g., the joke about it being the People’s Republic of Santa Monica. Jane Fonda’s ex-husband Tom Hayden represented the Santa Monica area in the state legislature for 18 years. Republican “family values” campaign themes don’t go over big in Santa Monica. The people who raise kids in Santa Monica can afford to insulate them with private schools, tutors, and all the rest. They don’t need politicians’ help in making it a little easier to raise their kids.

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All those Commies on the list?

Turns out they were Commies (and Soviet agents) after all.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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n September 2006, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Codie Stott, asked a teacher if she could sit with another group to do a science project as all the girls with her spoke only Urdu. The teacher’s first response, according to Stott, was to scream at her: “It’s racist, you’re going to get done by the police!” Upset and terrified, the schoolgirl went outside to calm down. The teacher called the police and a few days later, presumably after officialdom had thought the matter over, she was arrested and taken to a police station, where she was fingerprinted and photographed. According to her mother, she was placed in a bare cell for 3 1/2 hours. She was questioned on suspicion of committing a racial public order offence and then released without charge. The school was said to be investigating what further action to take, not against the teacher, but against Stott. Headmaster Anthony Edkins reportedly said: “An allegation of a serious nature was made concerning a racially motivated remark. We aim to ensure a caring and tolerant attitude towards pupils of all ethnic backgrounds and will not stand for racism in any form.”

Well. There it is.

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

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Mary Reason, 73, returned home from shopping to find her front door smashed down and a squad of police waiting.

The pensioner was due to give evidence at court but officers became concerned when she failed to contact witness services for three days.

Police broke down the door to her home in Staverton, near Gloucester, then billed Mrs Reason for £100 to pay for the cost of repairing the damage.

Now the pensioner is refusing to pay.

I’m a pensioner who has had a stroke and I shouldn’t have to deal with stuff like this from the police,” she said,

“They had no reason to break in. I get home and I find them in the house. The curtains were open and everything was neat and tidy.

“They could have just walked round and seen there were no problems. I won’t be paying – I shouldn’t have to.”

Well. There it is.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. (Oops — it already does, wherever fine drugs are sold.)

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The brown shirts immediately give them away.

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Well, really, it’s a Communist dictatorship. What did you expect?

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Maybe we can hook them up with the tribes united against climate change. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

What we really need is a bionic walrus….

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Fighting for the right to be primitive. Good luck with that.

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80 mph and 200 miles is not bad for an electric car.

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The problem is one of scale. Bigness is often an issue for greens, many of whom grew up reading one of the movement’s key texts: E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful. They liked biofuel while it was about recycling cooking fat, but not when it became growing millions of hectares of palm oil in former Borneo rainforest. Solar panels on roofs are good, but covering entire deserts with them is another matter. They like small wind turbines and even small wind farms, but get very jumpy as wind power reaches industrial scale.

Small may be beautiful, but it won’t change the world. You can’t generate vast amounts of green energy without large-scale engineering projects, which inevitably do some damage to the natural environment.

One of the nastiest things swept under the rug in recent years is the extent to which the various factions of the “progressive” coalition have incompatible interests.

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Actually, they’re pretty reasonable.

1. From now on, Nancy Pelosi has to wear a mask or ring a bell before she approaches a camera.

Who could say no to that?

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Now that’s comedy.

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Quite frankly, I’m surprised that they don’t have them already.

Hmmm. Perhaps they do — but just aren’t telling anybody.

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The mayor of Calais, Natacha Bouchart, has blamed Britain’s asylum and benefits system for “imposing” thousands of illegal migrants on her town.

Mrs Bouchart pointed out that the Calais Chamber of Trade was having to spend £12 million each year securing the port area – money she suggested the French government should pay back.

But it was Britain’s immigration system which was predominantly to blame for thousands of Africans, eastern Europeans and people from central Asia trying to clamber aboard lorries and trains in Calais to get to the UK every day.

“Requesting asylum is easier with them (the British) than in France,” said Mrs Bouchart.

“The asylum seeker is given accommodation and receives £31 to £40 a week according to their case, when the annual salary of the average Eritrean is around $200 (£136).

“That seems enormous and it’s attractive, even if in some places it’s nothing.”

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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No doubt starring Russell Crowe.

Wouldn’t mind seeing Gwyneth Paltrow in a suit of woad, though.

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That’s because Mandela is and always has been a Marxist revolutionary, not the South African Martin Luther King that everyone tries to paint him as.

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Your tax dollars at work.

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Great. I can blame my grumpy neighbors.

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Sales of Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s autobiography and apologia for his anti-semitism, are soaring in India where business students regard the dictator as a management guru.

I’ve read Mein Kampf – Drucker would be a better choice, guys.

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I would have favored his being lowered millimeter by millimeter into boiling oil – it’s traditional – but I suppose waterboarding will have to do.

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We claim that the only requirement for evil to succeed is that good people do nothing. Letting evil go unpunished ipso facto becomes the equivalent of rewarding it.

In its past and present manifestation, Islam is a pluperfect example of the way evil concentrates and does not diffuse. While good works unavoidably distribute their positive influence by increasing the overall quality of life, Islam can only spread itself by the sword. I doubt there exists a single historic example of a non-Muslim culture spontaneously and voluntarily abandoning its original belief system in favor of Islam.

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BakeWise, by former research biochemist Shirley Corriher, is one of the latest entries in this field, and, despite some home-run recipes, the book is more valuable as a highly readable baking textbook than as a cookbook. It provides a fascinating explanation of how component parts come together in the baking process, particularly how variables such as protein level in flours affect the process and the final product. Here I’d always thought that self-rising flour was for wimps who couldn’t be bothered to measure a few more ingredients; Corriher explains that flour companies use different leaveners than those available in the average supermarket, producing a more efficient rise and a better product.

We have the technology.

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Ha. Told you so.

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We have the math. And the graphs.

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“This budget makes clear that the era of Big Government is back, and Democrats want you to pay for it,” said House Republican leader John A. Boehner.

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I must confess I have a hard time getting upset about a correspondent for NPR and the Washington Post being thrown in jail by a regime whose behind her employers spend so much time smooching.

On the other hand, she’s an American citizen, and, while that doesn’t count for a lot in these degenerate modern times, it ought to.

We will continue to vigorously raise our concerns to the Iranian government.

Oh, I’m sure they’re perfectly acquainted with your concerns. Thinly veiled threats would be much more effective, although we’re not likely to see that with this yellow-dog administration.

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The group recommended that soldiers be required to wear lighter, cotton-nylon blend patrol caps instead. They block the sun, absorb sweat and are somewhat water resistant, Stuckey said.

I wondered how long it would take.

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Yet, many governments have been doing the exact opposite: putting lives at risk, just to bring in more revenue (often to pay off those private companies that installed the cameras). On top of that, there are still plenty of locations that don’t leave any pause between switching lights between cross traffic. Here in California, for example, it’s quite rare for there to be any pause between a light turning red in one direction, and the perpendicular traffic light turning green. Studies have shown that a slight pause — where all directions are red — decreases the number of accidents as well. And yet… governments focus on using traffic cameras solely to increase revenue.

Insert your favorite conspiracy theory here:

Any theory has to include an explanation for HOV lanes — not a high bar.

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The jolly typeface has spawned the Ban Comic Sans movement, nearly a decade old but stronger now than ever, thanks to the Web. The mission: “to eradicate this font” and the “evil of typographical ignorance.”

“If you love it, you don’t know much about typography,” Mr. Connare says. But, he adds, “if you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby.”

Indeed. Obsessing about little things suggests an unconscious realization that one has no power over bigger; this is why a spread of interest in “graphic novels” and video games is a disturbing indication that collectivism and over-regulation are growing, not shrinking, in the world.

David Friedman, as always, gets right to the core issue.

I think it is a more plausible slogan than the usual version. If you and I disagree because I want an outcome more favorable to me and you want an outcome more favorable to you, there is room for compromise—as we see whenever people bargain over the price of a house. But if we disagree because I see what I want as just and the alternative as unjust and you see it the other way around, compromise looks to both of us like moral treason.

There you have modern American politics. There you have modern American foreign policy. Hell, there you have the fargin Civil War.

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Christopher Howse is surprised to discover that for 400 years, a half of the world’s professing Christians lived under Muslim rule.

As virtual slaves.

In place of knowledge a series of myths has grown. One is of a cultural golden age in Islamic Spain, with Muslims, Christians and Jews living in harmony. Yet Americo Castro, who coined the word convivencia to describe the life of the three faiths in the caliphate of Cordoba, wrote, in his book The Structure of Spanish History: “Each of the three peoples of the peninsula saw itself forced to live for eight centuries together with the other two at the same time as it passionately desired their extermination.”

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Well, yeah, with Democrats in control, the military budget will go to shit. They’d be fools not to take advantage of this opportunity.

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You know how it is — we’re frightened and appalled by the thought of unmanned killing machines, but if they must exist we really, really want to play with one.

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Here’s something that has gotten lost in the drive to institute universal health insurance: Health insurance doesn’t automatically lead to health care. And with more and more doctors dropping out of one insurance plan or another, especially government plans, there is no guarantee that you will be able to see a physician no matter what coverage you have.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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Well, not really — if he did, they would just shoot him, thereby demonstrating that they understand how the world works a lot better than he does … and, of course, saving America a lot of grief, but not really doing that much for Mexico.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

I remember when I got the memo from Society informing me that my wife and I had been assigned the task of socializing our children. It came as quite a shock, let me tell you.

Each of the 450 or so episodes of The Simpsons is a lot more mentally stimulating than listening to your parents or to your daycare worker talk. (Okay, well, some of the episodes from this decade might not live up to that standard, but there are still a couple of hundred good ones.)

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Change you can believe in! Or maybe not.

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Sixteen million girls are missing in China. And now we know what happened to them: They were aborted because they weren’t boys.

And this was in Slate? Hell has just frozen over.

Two hundred boys for every 100 girls. The number is mind-boggling.

Indeed. Historically, having a lot more young boys than young girls leads to war. China’s no threat? Just wait.

It’s a terrible convergence of ancient prejudice with modern totalitarianism. Girls are culturally and economically devalued; the government uses powerful financial levers to prevent you from having another child; therefore, to make sure you can have a boy, you abort the girl you’re carrying.

A pro-choice policy that carries its own cure for feminism. Thank you, Margaret Sanger.