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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During this “peace”, of course, both the Taliban and the Pakistani armed forces have been continuing their attacks.

History (and the Koran) tell us that when Muslims make “peace” it’s only a truce to build up their forces for the next attack, so it’s not clear whom this Diplomacy Theater was intended to impress. Perhaps the U.N.; they’re about the only people I can think of who are that morbidly stupid.

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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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Just a heads-up, for those that need it. You know who you are.

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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.

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‘Qui procul hinc,’ the legend’s writ,—
The frontier-grave is far away—
‘Qui ante diem periit:
Sed miles, sed pro patria.’

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And guess how many are majority-Muslim states. My, what a surprise.

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But of course Islam is a Religion of Peace™. Ask anybody.

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The Blame America First crowd just can’t let something pass by without peeing in it.

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

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

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Yeah, it’s obscure, but it’s interesting. Cope.

Kimberley Strassel is, despite her ‘-ley’ name, always worth reading.

Purely from a philosophical standpoint, Mr. Specter’s move means nothing, because he didn’t leave his party on philosophical grounds. As even the good senator acknowledged in his press conference, his top priority is, and always has been, staying in office. Had the GOP last year allowed Mr. Specter to pen the entire party platform to his liking, he’d still have bailed this week. The Pennsylvanian has only ever been purely ideological on one issue: the polls.

In other words, a professional politician who will be more comfortable in the party of professional politicians.

The point here being that Mr. Specter isn’t necessarily a good indicator of how open, or not, the GOP is to “ideological” diversity. As it happens, the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate that Mr. Specter is now so unwilling to be “judged” by didn’t suddenly turn against him because he was pro-choice (he always has been) or pro trial-lawyer (ditto). He got in trouble after he voted for the blowout $787 billion stimulus bill. (More on that later.)

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The Hamas terrorist organization that controls the region has used the ceasefire following the IDF’s recent Operation Cast Lead to bring in advanced weapons through new tunnels built to replace those that were destroyed during the war. On Thursday, two Arab smugglers, or workers, were killed when a tunnel collapsed underneath the border at the town of Rafiah, where an official border crossing terminal between Gaza and Egypt is also located.

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

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I still want one.

Steve Sailer is not very impressed with David Brooks.

Look, to say that Mozart wasn’t special because he was just like Tiger Woods is the kind of skull-crushingly stupid thing that you can only get away with saying if you’re telling everybody what they want to hear.

Tiger Woods is 33 years old. He’s been celebrated on national television for his golf skills for over 30 years. Here’s a video (starts 0:45 in) of a two and a half year old Tiger being interviewed by Bob Hope and Jimmy Stewart on a nationally syndicated TV talk show.

The truth is, unsurprisingly, that Tiger Woods is special. And so was Mozart.

I have to say I rather agree with him.

How many kids lives get wrecked by this kind of thinking by their parents? When you read about 23-year-old Anthony Kim, who got a prototypical Korean-American maniacal drilling upbringing at the driving range where I hit balls when I was a kid, it’s a story that appears now to have a happy ending. But just two or three years ago, Kim looked like he was headed for Skid Row, he was drinking so heavily in rebellion against his domineering parents. His parents now tell other Korean parents who ask how they too can mold a pro golfer: Don’t even try.

You only see the stories with a happy ending. The stories you don’t see would be about all the Asian kids whose parents thought they could have a Tiger Woods too, and turned their kids’ childhood into a hell.

Good points all.

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Pontiac, now sacrificed for General Motors to reorganize, was ironically a car that helped GM survive the Great Depression.

Steve Sailer thinks about these things so that you don’t have to.

As a society, we don’t benefit when people wash out of expensive training programs for predictable reasons.

So, why wouldn’t a trucking firm at least consider a parallel parking test for job applicants?

Well, how about “disparate impact?” What if a legally protected demographic group such as, say, women turned out to pass the parallel parking test at less than four-fifths rate of the highest scoring demographic group?

(And, indeed, I suspect that most of you don’t.)

Lynn Viehl, New York Times bestselling author of stuff I probably wouldn’t want to read, isn’t too proud to wait.

I hate moving to another line. I’m superstitious; I usually have bad luck if I believe the promise of no-waiting. If I try to go to that place, someone faster with a truckload of purchases will dart in front of me, or the register will need a new tape, or some other calamity will happen that will make me wait three times as long as I would have if I’d just stayed put.

One of the most endearing characteristics of professional writers is that they can make anything interesting. Read it and see.

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That’s why I always have to laugh at movies where the CIA and other government agencies get these super-cool technical devices. They wish. Government equipment, even military equipment, is always about 10 years behind the commercial stuff. And ugly.

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Gone to goldbricks every one….