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Hence the name, I suppose.

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Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense.

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I’m pretty sure I saw a picture of Senator Byrd in there.

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Those are going to be hard genes to live with. Not to mention the embarrassment.

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Have they checked with the Xerox people?

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As in many areas of life, the problem is not what we know, but what we “know” that ain’t so.

Pipes knows whereof she speaks. She is a Canadian citizen (now living in California) and recounts her experiences under a single-payer system. She illustrates Canada’s cost-cutting measures that deny access to new drugs with a personal anecdote. Her uncle was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma five years ago. “If he’d lived in America, the miracle drug Rituxan might have saved him,” she writes. “But Rituxan wasn’t approved for use in Canada, and he lost his battle with cancer.”

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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

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And is that necessarily a bad thing? After all, how many people really need hand-made barrels, after all?

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Like zoning laws? I don’t — one of the more pernicious legacies of Herbert Hoover, they make sure that our cities aren’t going to be interesting ever again. Are we stuck with them? Maybe not….

As middle income residents have fled, the city itself has become a place of many have-nots and a few haves. Rather than invest to engender pride, safety, and a sense of community in the city’s neighborhoods – the small unstylish work of organizing – the doctrine sought to make downtown attractive, livable and appealing by applying the “edifice complex” or the “Field of Dreams theory”: if you build it they will come. Then the planners and developers get to stand around and wonder why downtown still feels empty.

The middle class watched, grew frustrated, and left for the periphery. Despite some of the most glorious – and reasonably priced – architecture in America, the middle class has left, taking with them much of the urban tax base. This creates a hole out from which few cities emerge.

David Friedman isn’t afraid to push the envelope.

There is no antitrust law in WoW, which makes it a good place to observe collusive behavior by sellers. My wife, who spends more time in the auction house buying ad selling than I do, has observed both an attempt to corner a market and an attempt, at least partly successful, to form a cartel—a cartel she was invited to join. Her refusal was met by a threat to drive her out of the market by underselling her. The organizer of the cartel had apparently not read Aaron Director’s analysis, reflected in McGee’s classic article on the myth of predatory pricing; it had not occurred to him that if he was selling, at an artificially low price, ten times as many gems as the interloper, he was also losing money ten times as fast. It took only a few days for him to discover the flaw in the strategy and abandon it.

And that’s always a good rule of thumb when reading Maureen Dowd.

… which I never do unless moved by an unusual circumstance — in this case, the hilarious photoshop of Obama as Spock.

Consider: The New York Times, perhaps the premier newspaper in the country (if not the world), winner of enough prizes and awards to sink the Titanic, actually paid her money to write this. And will continue to do so. That tells you all you need to know about why newspapers are dying.

Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

Political power is a property right, however you slice it. It is owned, not deserved. It is not a natural or “human” right. And it has no more to do with freedom than brake fluid with fondue.

So what we’d expect, just from rational first principles, is that if you start with a libertarian democracy, it will eventually become socialist. Socialism, as a theology of vote-buying and worse, is perfectly preadapted for Darwinian success in a democracy. If democracy is like cancer, socialism is like terminal cancer – the natural, entropic endpoint of the process.

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An international team of scientists has used the latest electro-magnetic induction equipment to discover that the Arctic ice is in fact “twice as thick” as they had expected, says Christopher Booker.

Imagine that.

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Large places like the U.S. and Europe can survive the fantasies of their ruling classes about environmental pseudo-science; small countries who mistake decadence for sophistication may not. Here’s a classic case.

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Pay special attention to the demo. Note that the human component filling orders in this warehouse need not be literate, need not be numerate, need only about an 80 IQ in order to function — the only reason there’s a human involved at all is because equipment of comparable flexibility would cost more than the minimum wage required for an adequate human.

This reminds me of a number of science-fiction dystopias I’ve run across.

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Can’t fault their priorities.

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

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So how come more women aren’t professional mathematicians?

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Apparently these people have never heard of x-ray machines.

“Duh, we’re from the government, and we’re here to help.”

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Students at Oxford University have been banned from reading books on the top shelves of the Bodleian library because the step-ladders used to reach them are against health and safety rules.

Steve Sailer distills the essence.

The conventional wisdom of the Obama Era appears to be that the solution to black underachievement is that we should take poor black children away from their mothers for as long as possible each day and turn them over to nice white people with liberal arts degrees for almost their entire waking hours.

Yeah, that about sums up the entire program of the Ruling Class.

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Pretty bad when a bunch of Arabs have more respect for European history than Europeans do.

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Wouldn’t it be nice if this applied to credit card agreements?

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Nearly a century of Washington’s efforts to promote homeownership has produced one calamity after another.

Ain’t that the truth.

And the usual dimwits call this a “failure of capitalism”. Dearie, capitalism had nothin’ to do with it.

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A woman government official is dragged from a lorry to the execution ground, made to kneel in the snow and then shot in the head, her last moments recorded in a set of photographs that have caused a sensation in China.

“Woman government official”. Hm. I’m thinking Nancy Pelosi, here.

However, rather than eliciting sympathy, the 30-year-old pictures have prompted calls for more executions of corrupt officials in modern China.

I certainly understand the feeling.

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You can’t make this stuff up.

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Step by step … closer and closer ….

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Darwin Award waiting to happen.

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

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I wasn’t aware that it was a potential problem. Still, safety first.

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Well, I’m certainly impressed.

Megan McArdle has the goods.

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The horror! The horror!

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While the rest of the world seems to understand that swine flu is not really about the swine, Egypt continues its mass slaughter of every pig in sight. It is on a national campaign to rid the country of its estimated 300,000 pigs in the name of public health.

Which brings us to the second reason for the pig assault in Egypt: the Coptic Christian pig owners. Egyptians never seem to miss an opportunity to unsettle its Coptic minority.

Copts complain about harrassement, discrimination in employment and lack of representation in government. Some live in fear that their children will be kidnapped and forcibly converted to Islam. They have taken to tattooing a Coptic cross to the wrists of their children as a sign of their identity.

Remember that the Copts are the native Egyptians, from before the Arab invaders arrived.

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Arnold Kling ponders the fact that money from the federal government is now the biggest source of revenue for state and local governments.

My prediction is that this will persist even when there is a recovery. It is bad news in many respects. It makes the spenders (in this case, state and local governments) even less accountable for making sure that money is well spent. For the politicians, the incentive to spend other people’s money is big enough when its your own constituents paying the taxes, and it’s even bigger when someone else’s constituents are paying the taxes.

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And who could blame them? They’ve been down this road before, and it’s full of potholes.

As to “where would they go?”, the classic answer is Switzerland. Or buy a Third World nation somewhere.

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When refugees seek safety in Afghanistan, of all places, the desperation and terror they leave behind can only be imagined.

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But Austin’s growth evinces another pattern. As Austin and its suburbs have grown, families with children have left central Austin for its fringes, ceding central Austin to singles and couples without children.

In the end the key reason people have been moving to the suburbs lies in a mundane reality. Austin families have been moving to the suburbs because the suburbs have bigger, better and cheaper houses.

Families want space, and the central housing stock is either too small or too expensive. This basic reality has transformed Austin into essentially two largely successful cities: a central core left to small households and suburbs that offer either larger housing, or smaller housing at much cheaper prices.

Austin’s McMansion ordinance will ensure that its central Austin neighborhoods remain the domain of small, aging bungalows – and people without children – for the foreseeable future. In this way, it will reflect the demographic realities of many prosperous, “hip” cities from San Francisco and Boston to Seattle and Portland.

Yet there’s an ironic side to this. Alarmed by the decline of families in the city, the same city council that enacted the McMansion ordinance created a new task force a few months later to determine why central Austin has now so few families with children.

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Not surprising that it looks like Barack Obama.

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Well, I suppose he had a good reason.

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It’s all gone be plastic by-em-by.

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

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

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This is one of the most entertaining movie reviews I’ve ever read.