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Darwin Award nominee.

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Campaigners for India’s ‘untouchable’ caste – who perform degrading jobs and suffer violence and persecution – on Monday night denounced the practice and said it highlighted how low-caste “dalits” were discriminated against even before conception.

Yeah, world to end, women and minorities hardest hit.

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We have the technology.

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And there you have it.

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GM and Segway’s joint venture is probably best described as a rickshaw without all the charm.

Well, once the nanny-staters wouldn’t let the Segway out in public, this is the obvious next step.

More here.

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I’m sorry, that’s just wrong.

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You never know what can happen when you fly the friendly skies….

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That’s certainly one of my recurring nightmares.

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I rather suspect that the Red State/Blue State borders are a more accurate predictor of where the U.S. would split, but I still find this sort of speculation fascinating. Fragmentation of the U.S is not an uncommon conceit in speculative fiction but usually depends more on the needs of the plot than of any practical analysis.

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Well, it’s got bacon. Duh.

Jeff Jarvis points to the silver lining of the current financial crisis.

Rates for the Hilton are about the same as for the Marriott. The Hilton site won’t say whether they charge for internet access. I call. They charge. I hang up. I book the Marriott, where it is included.

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Well, I’m glad to know that Britain is doing so well financially that they can piss away 100 million pounds on South African roads. Must be nice. Perhaps they could help us out over here.

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Oh, you mean that the spread of HIV is actually caused by individual behavior? Gee, you’d never know that from reading the newspapers — or from listening to the whining of the gay rights groups.

Or maybe it’s just heterosexual AIDS that is caused by individual behavior — homosexual AIDS droppeth like the rain upon the just and the unjust alike. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

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The latest hijacking happened on Saturday 400 nautical miles (740 kms) off the southern Somali port of Kismayu, between the Seychelles and Kenya, a regional maritime group said.

Makes you wonder why they send ships into this area, where they know pirates are operating with apparent impunity.

Needless to say, 100 years ago this problem would have already been taken care of.

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Peace Pie Street and Treacle Mine Road are among the list of streets named after the comic fantasy series of novels at the Kingwell Rise development in Wincanton, Somerset.

A beam of sunlight in an otherwise Stygian world.

Tyler Cowen looks at the bailouts — and their deficiencies.

But there is a big hole in these proposals, as there has already been in the government’s approach to bailing out failing financial companies. Even as they focus on firms deemed too big to fail, the new proposals immunize the creditors and counterparties of such firms by protecting them from their own lending and trading mistakes.

What the banking system needs is creditors who monitor risk and cut their exposure when that risk is too high. Unlike regulators, creditors and counterparties know the details of a deal and have their own money on the line.

But in both the bailouts and in the new proposals, the government is effectively neutralizing creditors as a force for financial safety. This suggests a scary possibility — that the next regulatory regime could end up even worse than the last.

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But at the heart of the dispute is a struggle that is tormenting Republicans both in the state and nationally: whether to rigidly pursue an agenda dominated by conservative social issues or reach out to more moderate voters with a pledge to focus chiefly on economic concerns.

That little word “rigidly” reveals the unconscious bias that permeates what passes for journalism these days. An unbiased reporter wouldn’t have written it; an unbiased editor wouldn’t have permitted it. But we have neither any more.

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

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There are many factors contributing to this trend. Diminishing social mobility, the cult of celebrity, the decline in serious learning, the increasing disregard for empiricism and social attitudes verging on “valuephobia” all threaten to cast a shadow on the enlightened western Liberalism which has taken us so far.

Distracted by celebrity, softened up by the education system, we have also succumbed to what you could call intellectual relativism. We have reached a state of affairs whereby people believe that the validity of their views is determined by the strength with which they hold them, not by any reference to empiricism. And so we hear phrases such as “Well that is your truth – it’s not mine”, or, increasingly, the word which is doing untold damage to the concept of objectivity: “whatever”. When confronted with evidence which undermines the current fashion or your own prejudices, simply lift your hand and say “whatever”, and you can avoid all the discomforts of the value of truth, or objectivity, or of being plain wrong.

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And there you have the modern world in a nutshell.

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College graduates are now looking toward government to start their careers, since there aren’t a lot of other places to look. Unemployment for government employees is about half the rate of almost all private industry workers, and Washington, D.C., is a rare U.S. city that seems recession-proof.

When working for the government is the best job out there, you are officially a Third World country. Just so you know.

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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.

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When the federal government keeps changing the rules, it’s like having Darth Vader in control, John H. Cochrane, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said during a panel. “I have changed the deal,” he intoned like Vader, the “Star Wars” villain. “Pray I don’t change it any further.”

And that tells you everything you need to know abut government “regulation” of the economy.

Mr. Vedder playfully offered another analogy: the recession of 1920. Why was that slump, over and done with by 1922, so much shorter than the following decade’s? Well, for starters, he said, President Woodrow Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke at the end of 1919, while his successor, Warren G. Harding, universally considered one of the worst presidents in American history, preferred drinking, playing poker and golf, and womanizing, to governing. “So nothing happened,” Mr. Vedder said.

Of course Mr. Vedder does not wish ill health — or obliviousness — on any chief executive. Still, in his view, when you’re talking about government intervention in the economy, doing nothing is about the best you can hope for from any president.

And that’s the truest thing you’ll read today.

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One of the reasons we’re often skeptical of legislative/regulatory solutions to things is that they almost always have unintended consequences that do a lot more harm than good — and quite often those unintended consequences are the exact opposite of what the regulation was supposed to do.

Every legislator ought to have that tattooed on his (or her) forehead.

A few years back, the government passed a bill to encourage “greener” transportation by providing tax credits for the use of alternative fuels — including for the use of fuel mixtures that combined alternative fuels with gasoline or diesel. As Chris Hayes explains, this resulted in America’s paper companies suddenly dumping diesel into their production process solely to qualify for the tax credit.

Free markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

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Our aim today is to restore narrative coherence to the 20th century, ridding it of mystical obfuscations, poltergeists, and winds of change. In UR’s 20th century, when things happen, they generally happen for a reason. The reason is generally the obvious reason.

The 20th century was the golden age of lies. The liars of the 20th century, like the painters of the 16th, will be remembered forever as the Old Masters of their art. I know UR has many readers who are Christians or Jews, and sometimes I even regret my own inability to believe in God. But no one who knows anything about the 20th century can fail to believe in the Devil.

Thus the standard story of the 20th century includes one set of actors which are portrayed accurately (the fascist regimes), one set which was portrayed inaccurately but has since been repaired with the assistance of whiteout (the revolutionary regimes), and one set whose mythos remains gloriously intact (the democratic regimes). From this stew, clarity is not to be expected.

A conservative is someone who helps disguise the true nature of a democratic state. The conservative is ineffective by definition, because his goal is to make democracy work properly. The fact that it does not work properly, has never worked properly, and will never work properly, sails straight over his head. He therefore labors cheerfully as a tool for his enemies.

The most gross misstatement about fascism presently understood, however, is that the Axis constituted a plot to take over the world. It is truly amazing that people believe this today, for there is no evidence for it whatsoever. However, most historians simply treat it as a given.

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Guess AIG’s problem was that they weren’t a quango — yet.

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Yeah, that Industrial Revolution is quite overrated.

Next: Reintroducing the Organic Corn Laws.

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Doesn’t appear to have been a Muslim, which is somewhat surprising.

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Don’t ever say we don’t do important stuff here.

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The story of my life.

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Guess the ghost doesn’t get out much.

Update: Link fixed.

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And there you have it.

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And yet leftist students do this habitually to “right-wing” flyers and newsletters published on campus that they disagree with, yet nothing ever happens to them.

Funny how that works.

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Yeah – what’s up with that?

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

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

They have the backing of President Obama, who promised on the campaign trail that collective bargaining and workplace protections “will be a priority” for his administration. “It is unacceptable for TSOs to work under unfair rules and without workplace protections — this makes it more difficult for them to perform their jobs,” Obama wrote in a letter to the American Federation of Government Employees in October. “Since 2001, TSA has had the unfettered ability to deny its workforce even the most basic labor rights and protections.”

Oh, they object to being treated the same way they treat airline passengers? Quelle domage.

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As of today, smokers will have to pay an additional tax 61 cents per pack of cigarettes, amounting to a 156 percent increase – and the very people President Obama promised to spare from higher taxes are bearing the brunt of the cost, since (as ATR has been pointing out on numerous occasions)

• 55 percent of smokers are “working poor”
• One in four smokers live below the poverty line
• On average, smokers, whose median income is a little more than $36,000, make about 30 percent less than non-smokers.

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Shores of Tripoli under Jefferson, yes; shores of Somalia under Obama, no.

Change you can believe in.

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Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their five children, aged from three to 11, will appeal to a court on Thursday in Tennessee, where they fled after attempts by German police three years ago to force the family to obey the country’s laws which make school attendance compulsory.

Huddled masses yearning to breathe free — good luck with that. And stay away from California.

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I’m perfectly comfortable with that.

The “white” label can hurt them with universities and companies that use the information to promote diversity, they say.

“Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking with the quota….”

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California has furloughed workers and slashed programs to close a $41 billion budget gap, but it still has more than 400 judges in Los Angeles County who each make more than the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

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

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Justice Department lawyers concluded in an unpublished opinion earlier this year that the historic D.C. voting rights bill pending in Congress is unconstitutional, according to sources briefed on the issue. But Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who supports the measure, ordered up a second opinion from other lawyers in his department and determined that the legislation would pass muster.

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

Of course, if the Bush administration had done something like this, both Congress and the media would be screaming “Politicization! Partizanship!” for the next ten years. But it’s the Obama Nation, so that’s all right then.

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“We’re from the government, and we’re here to help … ourselves.”

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I am not making this up.