Read it.

You mess with the best, you die like the rest.

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There are things the rich do that working class and middle class folks don’t. Some of them–living off the return on capital rather than wages or salary–are only available to the rich. Others–seeking a first-rate education for your kids, working for yourself rather than others–are things that ordinary folks do to the extent that they can, but their ability is limited. Even so, it’s worth learning the tactics of the rich and applying them where possible.

Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.

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Something to ponder, along with this map.

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It’s pretty bad when companies can make more money through lobbying the government than even through manipulating financial paper, much less actually making and selling stuff.

Yaacov Ben Moshe is right, as always.

This is a mugshot of Nour Hadid. Nour lives near Chicago. She is a muslim woman who has confessed to beating her two-year-old niece, Bhia Hadid, to death over a four day period of torture.

Nour’s husband, Alaeddin Hadid, who surely must have been away on a business trip or was so deeply immersed in the study of islamic texts that he did not notice the “head to toe”bruises, screams and what must (at least by the third day of beatings!) have been severely altered behavior, is very upset. Is he upset by the death of little Bhia? Is he devastated that his wife has confessed to this brutal, extended torture and murder?

No, actually, Alaeddin seems to be most upset by the photograph above. He prefers focussing and raging on the fact that his wife’s mug shot was released by the police and published in the press. He is upset because the mug shot shows her without her Hijab and with her shoulders exposed by the tank top she was wearing. He has been quoted as saying that the police are “really going to be in big trouble” because this is against their religion. He’s going to sue.

Read it.

This is why the Democrats, the party of corruption, cannot be trusted with government.

Read it.

Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.

Darwin Award nominee.

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Mount this on a ship, and send it to Somalia.

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Read it.

When the woman who calls herself Queen Omega moved into a three-bedroom house here last December, she introduced herself to the neighbors, signed contracts for electricity and water and ordered an Internet connection.

What she did not tell anyone was that she had no legal right to be in the home.

Ms. Omega, 48, is one of the beneficiaries of the foreclosure crisis. Through a small advocacy group of local volunteers called Take Back the Land, she moved from a friend’s couch into a newly empty house that sold just a few years ago for more than $400,000.

In other words, she’s a thief. This is the reduction ad absurdam of the entitlement culture: If you want something, just take it. If somebody has something that you don’t have, you have somehow been cheated of it, you’re entitled to “take it back”.

In a functional culture, the legal system takes care of such systems, quickly and surely. In a dysfunctional culture, such as we are rapidly becoming, the law is ineffective. When it comes to be seen as ineffective, and when people whose property is being stolen grasp that emotionally, then you get vigilante groups enforcing the property rights that the official government can’t or won’t. And then Hell descends upon the just and the unjust alike.

These people are sowing the wind, and forgetting that they will reap the whirlwind.

The Hog isn’t doing politics any more.

Here’s a funny question. Has anyone noticed how American troops stopped dying in Iraq after Obama was elected?

Seriously, when was the last time you read about “mounting death tolls”? When was the last time you saw a journalist quote the latest figure? We know journalists are honest and fair, so the only possible explanation is that Americans aren’t being killed any more.

I’ve also noticed that global warming has slowed down, the planet is no longer running out of oil, and crazy government spending is no longer a bad thing. When Bush spent billions, it was very, very bad! Bush was a bad man! Now Obama spends trillions, and we all realize it just makes life better for kitties and puppies and flowers and baby ducks, which is what government is supposed to do.

Hold it, I have to throw up.

Timothy Burke is rather an odd fellow but occasionally he hits a jackpot. Here he discusses buying fantasy books.

Other things that are likely to drive me off:

1) “Book One in the Dark Swords of Black Terror Trilogy”.
2) Mostly, if the word “vampire” appears anywhere in the cover, title or blurb. It stops being “mostly” if “vampire” appears in the same blurb with “elf”.
3) Titles or blurbs that contain the name of a fantasy kingdom that sounds more like a prescription medicine for depression or impotence.
4) Anything that contains three of the following four elements in the blurb: plucky but innocent young heroine, farmboy with a destiny, dark lord of evil, wise ancient wizard. “Handsome voodoo priest” is a bonus demerit.
5) The word, “Drizzt”.

I have to confess, I’m with him there. He also has the virtue of being of one mind with me regarding the defects in most modern fantasy fiction:

The problem with Acacia is a problem that a lot of genre fantasy has: it too often reads like the detailed notes of a Dungeons & Dragons’ gamemaster about his campaign world rather than as a work of narrative fiction. The tedious (but accurate) old dictum to “show, not tell” is violated with astonishing aggressiveness within the first hundred pages, but not in any consistent or deliberate fashion. You know you’re in trouble when the king’s chief advisor Thaddeus murders a messenger who carries vital news and following a description of the act, Durham continues, “Thaddeus was not entirely the loyal servant of the king that he seemed” (and more still along those lines following). No shit, Sherlock. Of the many things that could go unsaid in the novel, this is only the beginning. Almost any of them–the lengthy expositional asides about the cultures, practices or peoples in the novel, the omniscient descriptions of characters and actions that suddenly erupt out of (a great many) viewpoint characters, could be unsaid or said minimally to vastly greater effect. As a sparce, fast-moving narrative that concentrated on its plot, it wouldn’t be half-bad. As a diagrammatic and pointlessly long act of world-creation, it’s clumsy and tedious at many points.

Read it.

So I guess Pakistan is next after Afghanistan, right.

Yeah, right.

Read it.

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$1.2 trillion deficit, and they can’t come up with the money for a world-class military.

We always knew that the Democrats were the party of corruption, we just didn’t know that they were the party of treason as well.

Read it.

Not that they’ll ever get much credit.

The Hog doesn’t do political commentary any more. Nope. Wouldn’t think of it.

It looks like the liberals have won the education battle. Socialism has caused the deaths of tens of millions of people, and it has never produced a good standard of living anywhere, and it is the greatest evil mankind has ever encountered. But a fair number of Americans, especially those who were “educated” after our school system was destroyed by liberals, think socialism is…pretty rad. No work! Free beers! Che T-shirts! If you want to be a lazy, flabby slouch all your life, socialism is the bomb. A lot of people are content to live that way. Clip your own wings and belly up to the trough.

Just tools and food, and some religion here and there. That’s all. Nothing else.

Here is the lesson conservatives should have learned from the last three elections, especially after seeing the impact of swing voters. The stupid are incredibly dangerous. The stupid make totalitarianism possible. Our kids are stupid, and they’re getting more stupid every decade. Look out.

Read it.

Elizabeth Wurzel, a writer turned lawyer, bites the hand that fed her.

Anyone who toils in the legal-industrial complex — better known as Big Law — should be able to tell you how we got here. Corporate attorneys like me, even those with the eyesight and insight of Mr. Magoo, all should have been able to see this financial collapse coming.

Read it.

This is the season of the beat-sweetener. A beat-sweetener (some prefer the term source-greaser) is a gratuitously flattering profile that a reporter writes about a government official in the hope that it will encourage (or, at the very least, not impede) that reporter’s access to the official in question. Newspapers and magazines have been full of them, and even the uninitiated may feel they’ve been reading a lot of dull profiles lately without knowing exactly why. My advice is to adopt a defensive-reader posture and treat all profiles of Obama’s new team as guilty until proven innocent. If you encounter emollient rhetoric in the first five paragraphs, skip the rest and move on. A beat-sweetener is a meal prepared for someone other than yourself, and there’s no reason you should waste precious time ingesting it.

The smell must be getting pretty bad when a Democrat administration — and its publicity arm, the dinosaur media — are being criticized in Slate, mouthpiece of the Chattering Classes.

Read it.

Don’t you long for the days when governments gave work to the best people for the job, rather than using the procurement process to make political statements? I do.

Presumably KB&R was given the job because they were the lowest bidder. So you have to wonder how much this posturing on the part of elected officials is costing the taxpayers. Oh, sorry, they’re they “forgotten man” in all this. They exist to fund the ruling class’s feel-good moments.

Read it.

Steve Sailer points out the “diversity” is just another word for racism.

Something you’ll notice over the years is that controversies over the use of quotas in fire department promotions are much more heated than controversies over the quotas that all big city fire departments use in their initial hiring. That’s because the applicants/victims of the initial hiring quotas aren’t told they are victims, they’re just sent a rejection letter.

But what can mere applicants do? Nobody will tell them anything about how they did because they are just random individuals. They’re not in the union, they don’t know any higher-ups or any clerks, they’re nobodies. Whereas firemen who have been waiting for years to be promoted have lots of ways of finding out what their scores were, so they raise a stink.

The Obama administration, taking its first stand on race and civil rights, sided with the city officials and said they were justified in dropping the test if it had “gross exclusionary effects on minorities.”

To notice the Fundamental Constant of Sociology gets you Watsoned out of polite society. So, we’re supposed to act like it’s a complete surprise every time we run into exactly the same situation.

Read it.

Good news for us, bad news for the Regressives.

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No rose without a thorn.

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

Read it.

I like the one with the lights inset into the roofline.

The Lamborghini isn’t bad, either.

Darwin Award nominee.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Another good reason not to live in the urban core.

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The council has debated mandating hybrid purchases. But the rumor among taxi drivers is that in addition, or perhaps instead, the city or other government agency will eventually subsidize the purchase of a hybrid.

Drivers have decided that they should not purchase a Prius or other hybrid until the subsidy arrived. Buying one now would mean over-paying.

There is a memorable Dilbert cartoon where Ken from Sales kills the market for a product by describing all of the great features to come in the next version, which Dilbert notes won’t be out for another year.

No matter how may times politicians get their noses rubbed in the fact that government activity distorts markets in unwholesome ways, they persist in doing it.

There would have been two preferable possibilities: for the government to come forth quickly with its subsidy, or make it clear from the beginning that no subsidy was coming. With both Chicago taxis and the secondary market for mortgages, the government did neither. Instead, it only fueled rumors that subsidies were on the way, and froze the same markets it intended to stimulate.

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

Read it.

So much for Obama being a Muslim.

So much for Obama being a Christian.

He is, however, a certifiable politician.

Read it.

The U.S. Treasury took enormous powers for itself last fall by telling Congress they would use it to “ensure the economic well-being of Americans.” Six months after passage of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 Americans are worse off.

The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was sold to Congress and the American public as an absolute necessity to save the American Dream of homeownership. Once the legislation was passed and the funds were released, however, Treasury decided to give the money to banks with no restrictions on its use – no monitoring, no reporting requirements, no nothing. We are worse off today than we were when the legislation was signed – and are likely to remain so when TARP has its first year birthday later this year.

John Tierney picks a side in the War on Salt in New York.

That antifat campaign, like the antisalt campaign, was endorsed by prominent groups and federal agencies before the campaigners’ theory was tested in rigorous trials. It too seemed quite logical — in theory.

But in practice the results were dismal, as demonstrated eventually by clinical trials and by the expanding waistlines of Americans. People followed the advice in the “food pyramid” to reduce the percentage of fat in the diet, but they got more obese, perhaps because they ate so many other ingredients in foods with “low fat” labels.

You might think that experience would inspire caution among public health officials, but instead they seem to be gaining confidence. When Dr. Frieden and Mr. Bloomberg decided several years ago that trans fats were dangerous, they didn’t simply issue a warning or a set of voluntary guidelines. They insisted on outlawing trans fats in New York’s restaurants.

Carrie Vaughn (whose books you really ought to read, by the way; she’s in the list of Recommended Writers over there on the right) takes on the love that launched a thousand books.

Read it.

TPPF commissioned research firm Arduin, Laffer & Moore Econometrics to produce the the study, titled “The Economic Impact of Federal Spending on State Economic Performance – A Texas Perspective.” The report shows that the state of Texas could lose anywhere from 131,400 to 171,900 jobs as a result of accepting federal stimulus dollars.

Dat ol’ debbil Unintended Consequences (with Economically Clueless multiplier) strikes again.

Read it.

Or it could just be a city whose revenues are down and could use some publicity.

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Yeah, they’re the winners.

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Oh, no!

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Sometimes you just have one of those days … although I’d be reluctant to characterize a boat worth only £20k a “yacht”.

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One of Spain’s most enduring historical mysteries is close to being solved as experts undertake a project to decipher more than 10,000 Arabic inscriptions adorning the walls and ceilings of the Alhambra palace in Granada.

Wonder how many of them just say “Hey, we’re really great!” and “Kill the infidels!”?

The Nasrid motto – “There is no victor but Allah” – is the most common inscription found so far.

Read it.

Yeah, there are a lot of Aztecs hanging around wanting that cleared up….

Check it out.

Some people just have entirely too much time on their hands.

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Join the club.

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Medical officers who oversaw interrogations of terrorism suspects in CIA secret prisons committed gross violations of medical ethics and in some cases essentially participated in torture, the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a confidential report that labeled the CIA program “inhuman.”

Isn’t it amazing how often these “confidential reports” wind up being published by, oh, say, the Washington Post?

Let’s see: Any criticism for “gross violations of medical ethics” of doctors who deliberately kill unborn children? Nope, not here.

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Pay-for-performance, the personnel system President George W. Bush advanced in an effort to replace the traditional General Schedule wage scale, has come under tough scrutiny by federal employee unions and their allies on Capitol Hill.

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

But now, eight chairmen and subcommittee chairmen in the House have upped the ante and urged the Obama administration to suspend any further implementation — government-wide — of pay-for-performance.

The chairmen, all Democrats, questioned the justification for such programs in a Friday letter to Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Yeah, everybody knows that government workers get paid without reference to performance. What was Bush thinking?

Read it.

And you think you’ve got problems….