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Imagine that.

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“In spring 2006 the French government arranged for three bears from Slovenia to be released into the forests near Arbas,” Arcangeli tells me. “Two others were released near other villages. Gendarmerie intelligence warned us that there might be a few protesters, mostly farmers worried about their sheep being attacked. But 250 turned up, smashing anything they could find outside the town hall, trying to break in, spraying paint and throwing bottles of blood. Eighty gendarmes tried to keep order.”

The plan, agreed between Spain, France and Andorra, had been to introduce 15 bears over three years but since the Arbas riots no more have been released.

I guess the protests worked.

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When earlier this week President Obama signed a $410 billion spending bill to keep the government running through the fall, every account of the event noted the 800-pound contradiction in the room. Mr. Obama had campaigned against earmarks, even saying he would cut them back to levels before 1994, the start of the Gingrich-GOP interregnum. Now here was Obama as president signing a bill soaked in earmarks.

Here’s another way of putting it: The U.S. budget is now history’s biggest mountain of swag; it is uncountable goodie bags filled with tax revenue. Mr. Obama’s swag mountain, the fiscal year 2010 “budget,” is $3.59 trillion high (25% of total GDP of about $14 trillion). His $800 billion stimulus bill was another pile of public cash. We the people have concluded that if we don’t use the Honorable John or Nancy or Ted in Congress to get our piece of it, someone else will get it.

Barack Obama isn’t a reformer. He’s the president of Earmark Nation. We are about to enact the Obama federal health-insurance entitlement, which on top of all the other entitlements and their limitless liabilities will require pulling trillions of dollars more into the federal budget. Whatever nominal public good this is supposed to achieve, it means that they, these 535 pols, most of them gerrymandered for life, will decide in perpetuity the details of how to dole it out.

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The ancient city of Canterbury has found itself the subject of a complaint from homosexual rights activists for not having a gay bar.

Well, if gay is the new black, then they need quotas, right?

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When SteamPunk is just to johnny-come-lately.

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I wouldn’t be surprised.

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

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That’s great, but it still creeps me out.

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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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There is, of course, no evidence that sea levels have risen by any significant amount, and no reason to believe that they will any time soon; it’s all speculation and hand-wringing.

This is what happens when ignorant people listen to stupid people and take them seriously. Unfortunately, there’s as much of that going on in Washington as there is in the Maldives.

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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.

Read it.