David Brooks is back on the reservation, if only for a visit.

Freud said we’re forever changed by the traumas of our youth, and so it is with the Democrats and Clintoncare. Even as you watch the leading Democrats today in their moment of glory, you can still see wounds caused by the defeat of the Clinton health care initiative. You see the psychic reactions and the scars and the lessons they have taken away so that sort of debacle never happens again.

All of this has produced a ruthlessly pragmatic victory machine. Last week Democrats were able to pass a politically treacherous cap-and-trade bill out of the House. The Democratic leaders were able to let 44 members vote no and still bribe/bully/cajole enough of their colleagues to get a win. This was an impressive achievement, and a harbinger for health care and other battles to come.

The great paradox of the age is that Barack Obama, the most riveting of recent presidents, is leading us into an era of Congressional dominance. And Congressional governance is a haven for special interest pleading and venal logrolling.

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The bottom line about the international aspects of climate change is that the very idea of an effective response assumes the existence of a generally cooperative international environment. It doesn’t assume the non-existence of the odd “rogue” state here or there, but it assumes the absence of any kind of serious great power rivalries. Not just China, but also India and probably Russia, Brazil, and Indonesia as well are going to need to cooperate in a serious way with the OECD nations on this. And I just don’t see how you’re going to get where you need to get through coercion. If anything, I think attempted economic coercion of China is more likely to wind up breaking down solidarity between the US, EU, and Japan than anything else. First, we impose our carbon tariff. Then suddenly Airbus and European car companies are getting all kinds of sales because the EU hasn’t followed suit. Now not only are the Chinese mad at us, we’re mad at the Europeans. Optimistically, at this point everyone decides coercion is unworkable and we start to back away.

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I’m sure they’d want some money along with, but we’d still profit on the deal.

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So what are they afraid of? Communist bureaucrats are very dependable — if they ban something, it’s almost certainly good for you.

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Just to make you keep your legs crossed the rest of the day.

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Militant groups banned in Pakistan are expanding operations and recruitment in Pakistani-run Kashmir, according to a government report seen by the BBC.

Guess that really worked, huh.

Despite the fact that the groups mentioned in the report are banned under Pakistan’s terrorism act, it does not advocate any action against them other than to keep an eye on their activities.

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The past may have always been worse than the present, but some periods were better than others. And as Thomas Malthus showed, what made for an enjoyable era was plenty of disease, war, and other disasters beforehand — to clear out a good chunk of the population, leaving much more stuff to go around per person among the survivors.

So, the simple way to get plenty of this vitamin is to steal it. Find an animal that has spent all day processing the plants that are rich in the precursors — this animal will have created true vitamin A from all this junk, and it will have stored most of the unused portion in its liver. Kill this animal and eat its liver — and boom, you’ve hit the vitamin A jackpot. And all without letting a single leaf of spinach enter your mouth.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading. Always.

In general, in cities that have tipped toward minority political dominance, where conmen like Rev. Kimber are trying to get their hands on control of the jobs, unions sometimes provide a bulwark against race discrimination.

This provides a new/old perspective on the much-denounced subject of teachers’ unions. It’s widely believed that if only we got rid of teachers unions, then we’d have superstar teachers in every inner city classroom. Yet, history suggests that we might wind up with worse teachers because rising politicians would try to fire the old white teachers and give their jobs to co-ethnics.

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Tacked to my wall is a lithograph of the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington. For many years, it graced my mother’s one-room schoolhouse in Lime Rock, N.Y. Antiquarian relic or enduringly relevant image? The same question may be asked of the “little red schoolhouse” itself, whose reality and legend are the subject of “Small Wonder.” Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor at New York University, sets out to tell “how — and why — the little red schoolhouse became an American icon.” Mr. Zimmerman proves a thoughtful and entertaining teacher.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Well, it’s Afghanistan. They’re the ones who dynamited the famous ancient Buddha statues. What do they care about anything that happened pre-Islam?

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Relatives dressed in police uniforms stormed the bridegroom’s house in the district of Charsadda, in North West Frontier Province.

“The assailants took the bridegroom out while some of the attackers climbed the wall and entered the house. They killed the bride, the mother and sister of the bridegroom,” said Saleem Jan, a police official for the Charsadda district.

“They beat them first and then shot them dead,” he told AFP news agency.

The groom’s father was also killed, another police official told AFP.

Now, let’s see — were they Presbyterians? No, I don’t think so … Maybe Baptists? Uh, I suspect not … Surely they couldn’t have belonged to the Religion o’ Peace™?

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For “grant system” read “government funding”.

One major impediment, scientists agree, is the grant system itself. It has become a sort of jobs program, a way to keep research laboratories going year after year with the understanding that the focus will be on small projects unlikely to take significant steps toward curing cancer.

Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy strikes again.

The institute’s reviewers choose such projects because, with too little money to finance most proposals, they are timid about taking chances on ones that might not succeed. The problem, Dr. Young and others say, is that projects that could make a major difference in cancer prevention and treatment are all too often crowded out because they are too uncertain. In fact, it has become lore among cancer researchers that some game-changing discoveries involved projects deemed too unlikely to succeed and were therefore denied federal grants, forcing researchers to struggle mightily to continue.

Your tax dollars at work, so to speak.

In other words, had we been depending on the government to support the necessary research, large numbers of women would be dead now. Private money (of the worst kind: corporate money) came to the rescue.

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In one case, a group of Iraqi soldiers saw a Pioneer flying overhead and, rather than wait to be blown up, waved white bed sheets and undershirts at the drone—the first time in history that human soldiers surrendered to an unmanned system.

In technology circles, new products that change the rules of the game, such as what the iPod did to portable music players, are called “killer applications.” Foster-Miller’s new product gives this phrase a literal meaning. The Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System (SWORDS) is the first armed robot designed to roam the battlefield. SWORDS is basically the Talon’s tougher big brother, with its gripping arm replaced by a gun mount that can carry pretty much any weapon that weighs under three hundred pounds, ranging from an M-16 rifle and .50-caliber machine gun to a 40mm grenade launcher or an antitank rocket launcher. In less than a minute, the human soldier flips two levers and locks his favorite weapon into the mount. The SWORDS can’t reload itself, but it can carry two hundred rounds of ammunition for the light machine guns, three hundred rounds for the heavy machine guns, six grenades, or four rockets.

The small UAVs, like the Raven or the even smaller Wasp, fly just above the rooftops, sending back video images of what’s on the other side of the street; Shadow and Hunter circle over entire neighborhoods; the larger Predators roam above entire cities, combining reconnaissance with the ability to shoot; and too high to see, the Global Hawk zooms across an entire country, capturing reams of detailed imagery for intelligence teams to sift through. Added together, by 2008, there were 5,331 drones in the U.S. military’s inventory, almost double the number of manned fighter planes. That same year, an Air Force lieutenant general forecast that “given the growth trends, it is not unreasonable to postulate future conflicts involving tens of thousands.”

In some ways, this seems reasonable. Many wartime atrocities are not the result of deliberate policy, wanton cruelty, or fits of anger; they’re just mistakes. They are equivalent to the crime of manslaughter, as compared to murder, in civilian law. Unmanned systems seem to offer several ways of reducing the mistakes and unintended costs of war. They have far better sensors and processing power, which creates a precision superior to what humans could marshal on their own. Such exactness can lessen the number of mistakes made, as well as the number of civilians inadvertently killed.

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Which makes a certain degree of sense.

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So there.

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David Fitzherbert’s half-inch wide handset in his breast pocket caused him to get wedged in a crack of ice, stopping him from falling further.

Sounds almost like one of those Superbowl commercials.

Steve Sailer remembers the inconvenient stuff.

A great tragic story could be made about how Milk’s gay liberation movement unleashed its own nemesis. Within two decades of Milk’s arrival, gay rights had transformed Castro Street into the plague spot of the Western world, with AIDS killing its 10,000th San Franciscan in 1993.

Left out is almost everything that could add context and flavor, such as Milk’s alliance with Jim Jones’s Maoist Peoples Temple cult. Just ten days before Milk and Mayor George Moscone were murdered by working class politician Dan White, 907 ex-San Franciscans drank the Kool-Aid in Jonestown.

At least on TV, the suave candidate displayed only a hint of his native Long Island accent, while Penn plays him as an annoying noodge. And, oddly enough, the real Milk was better looking than the movie star. Penn, who in the 1980s would add slabs of muscle for roles as rapidly as Mickey Rourke did for “The Wrestler,” is now, at only 48, as wrinkled as a Shar Pei puppy.

During television appearances, Milk came across as a calm, moderately masculine presence, with only slight gay mannerisms. In contrast, Penn’s histrionic act sets your gaydar clanging like the meltdown siren at a nuclear power plant. That’s important, because Penn’s decision to play Milk as utterly unable to pass for straight robs Milk’s story of much of its interest. The real man, who had served without incident as a Naval officer, chose to come out of the closet.

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Things they never taught you at Academy of the Rapier.

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

Steve Sailer just keeps on nosing around.

In the meantime, here’s a great John Kass column from the Chicago Tribune on February 14, 2009 (or as the day is known in Chicago history, St. Valentine’s Day) that’s highly relevant to the Ricci case. The background is that in the 1990s, Chicago spent a fortune on devising the perfect unbiased police and fire promotion civil service tests. When the test creation process was complete, everybody in Chicago agreed that, finally, a non-discriminatory test had been perfected. Of course, it turned out that whites ended up earning 95% of the scores high enough for promotion, so a political firestorm ensued. For a while, Mayor Richard M. Daley stoutly defended a test on which no expense had been spared, but eventually he caved in and announced that some of the top scorers would get promotions but other worthies would get promotions too, based on “merit” in order to bring “diversity” to leadership positions. This “merit” system was extended to firefighters.

And don’t miss the adventures of the exciting Boyle brothers. Read The Whole Thing.

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“Well, with King Ferdinand spinning in his grave like that we figured it would be a shame not to harness that as a source of green power….”

Steve Sailer just loves to stir the pot.

The 1970s were not a time when gay liberation “advanced haltingly;” in reality, the 1970s were when all effective legal restrictions on industrial scale homosexual promiscuity were utterly ended in precisely those cities — e.g., San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York — where AIDS broke out most virulently in the early 1980s.

Instead, we’re all supposed to believe AIDS was caused by discrimination against homosexuals in the military, the absence of gay marriage, and/or Ronald Reagan. Indeed, it’s precisely because the evidence for cause and effect is so overwhelmingly clear that the pressure to lie and to submit to others’ lies is so intense.

Steve Sailer looks a the mortgage meltdown discussion.

In public, there are only two sides: the liberal (Corporate Greed!) and the libertarian (Government Interference!).

In contrast, the real divide is between the overwhelmingly dominant Diversity Dogmatists, liberal and libertarian, versus the tiny number of Diversity Heretics. Personally, I don’t oppose government regulation of the mortgage business to prevent over-optimistic borrowers and lenders from causing defaults down the road, so I’m not a libertarian on this. But, in this case, the federal government was (and still is) regulating in the wrong direction: toward more risk.

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Can the U.S. be far behind? We’ve got the same sort of delusional idiots in charge.

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

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Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.

This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN’s major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week’s meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group.

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

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Well, perhaps if it were run by Europeans or Chinese it could….

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A study of the prehistoric remains has revealed that human flesh formed part of the diet of early man and children and adolescents in particular were regularly killed and eaten.

Still are, some would say.

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Back when the housing mania was taking off, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank famously said he wanted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to “roll the dice” in the name of affordable housing. That didn’t turn out so well, but Mr. Frank has since only accumulated more power. And now he is returning to the scene of the calamity — with your money. He and New York Representative Anthony Weiner have sent a letter to the heads of Fannie and Freddie exhorting them to lower lending standards for condo buyers.

Somebody doesn’t like the cap & trade bill.

They passed this shameful fraud because they wanted to get out of town for the July 4th holiday. The rest of us get July 4th off. They get a week or more. In fact, who knows when they’ll return from this recess. Will it be to push through another huge, unread bill, this time on health care? We’re two for two now: the Stimulus Attack and the Energy Fraud.

By the way, one of the features of Cap and Trade is that your local agency for building codes will be by-passed. They’re going to set up a building code bureaucracy in Washington and fill it full of time-servers. Which means you can wait till hell freezes over to get an approval or inspection.

Does this mean your local agency will shut down? Heavens, no! They’ll just be the go-between. You’ll have more hoops to jump through, is all. The Imperial Congress strikes again! Practice your hoop-jumping; it’s a non-productive skill you’ll need to survive in this brave new world.

Recession? No problem! We’ll just destroy what’s left of the economy, so everyone is equally miserable! Your tax dollars at work!

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Your future under Islam. Don’t say that you weren’t warned.

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If people want to kill themselves, fine, but it’s narcissistic to do it in a way that inconveniences other people. Idiots.

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With this application you can improve your relationships by applying concepts of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) on your girlfriends. Think about your girlfriend as a client! What information and tools you need to improve your relationship? This application is the answer.

For the iPhone, of course.

Don’t say we don’t have useful stuff here.

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Young British actresses who have struggled to find work at home are flocking to Bollywood to capitalise on the Indian film industry’s insatiable appetite for white-skinned talent.

Any cries of outrage from the Racism Industry? No?

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Andy Kessler, who’s been thinking an awful lot about these issues (and whose book The End of Medicine hasn’t received nearly the attention it deserves) has an interesting article discussing why the industry has resisted the move to e-healthcare records. While it would save some money, he notes, it would also expose the entire scam of the healthcare system: which is that they make a ton of money from inefficiencies baked into the system, which are totally hidden from view. It’s a massive boondoggle for the industry, and e-healthcare records would actually make it easier for people to understand that the healthcare system profits from people being sick and not from having them be well.

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The founding document of Islam is the group of writings collected in the Koran. A devout Muslim believes the Koran to be the perfect, immutable, and eternal word of Allah as dictated to the prophet Mohammed and memorized or written down by the companions of the Prophet. The book is complete, every word in it is true, and nothing in it has been altered since it was first transcribed 1400 years ago.

That’s the traditional view of the core Islamic scriptures, and woe betide any Muslim who questions it. Scholars who attempted to research the origins of the Koran and examine its historical variants have been driven out of Pakistan, Egypt, and other Muslim countries, and have been forced to seek refuge in the academic cloisters of the infidel West.

“The Koran claims for itself that it is ‘mubeen,’ or ‘clear,’“ [Puin] says. “But if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn’t make sense. Many Muslims — and Orientalists — will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible — if it can’t even be understood in Arabic — then it’s not translatable. People fear that. And since the Koran claims repeatedly to be clear but obviously is not — as even speakers of Arabic will tell you — there is a contradiction. Something else must be going on.”

In the context of 21st-century Salafist fundamentalism, criticism and analysis of the Koran can cost a scholar his life. The example of Salman Rushdie — who was, after all, only an amateur critic of Islamic scripture — did not go unnoticed.

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France is to be taken to the European Court of Justice for failing to protect the Alsace hamster, a cuddly rodent threatened with extension in its native eastern France.

Truly, you can’t make this stuff up.

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A decade ago all three states were among America’s most prosperous. California was the unrivaled technology center of the globe. New York was its financial capital. New Jersey is the third wealthiest state in the nation after Connecticut and Massachusetts. All three are now suffering from devastating budget deficits as the bills for years of tax-and-spend governance come due.

Well, that’s what happens when you follow political fashion rather than common sense.

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Your future under Islam. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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One of the problems with Pakistan is that radical Islamic ideology is fully intertwined with the government and the armed forces at all levels. When Western governments attempt to pick winners and losers among the factions vying for power in Pakistan, there is no real way to avoid the extremists and terrorists. Whether it is made up of elected civilians or military officers, most governments in Pakistan seem to be riddled with terrorist connections. A government that is relatively free of such connections — such as the current one under President Asif Al Zardari — will tend to be ineffective, due to a lack of accord with public opinion, much of which has sympathies with fundamentalist Islam.

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Indeed, it is so-called “smart land use” (“smart growth”) that intensified the housing bubble in California. “Smart land use” involves planners telling the market where development will and will not occur. In the process it ignores the price signals of the market. Owners of land on which development is permitted naturally and rationally raise their asking prices, while owners of land not so favored can expect little more than agricultural value when they sell. The result is that the land element of housing prices exploded, fueling the unprecedented bubble. Restrictions on supply naturally lead to higher prices, whether in gasoline, housing or anything else.

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One of the worst aspects of both the Human Rights Act and European law generally is that they encourage disreputable behaviour. Much European law consists of vague statements of principle that are concerned with ideals rather than practicalities and in doing so leaves scope for spurious claims by those keen to bask in the bright sunshine of victimhood or who see the chance to enrich themselves with an unearned buck. It might just be that I am too deeply immersed in the English common law to understand the European way of doing things, but I am not so immersed as to be unable to see a style of law that is more concerned with political gestures than with freely agreed individual relationships.

This applies equally well to Latin America, which takes its legal and cultural traditions from Europe, and is therefore constantly awash in high-sounding idealistic slogans papered over perennial violence, oppression, and corruption.

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Piloted by aliens, of course; we don’t want to go too far out on a limb here.

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You’ll be surprised.

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Ah — but do they yawn, as well?

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As with most discussions of AIDS and HIV, this proceeds on the assumption that HIV is just something that happens to people, like the common cold. Nowhere is mentioned the irrefutable fact that people who keep their pants zipped just don’t get HIV, period — aside from the miniscule number who contract it from extraordinary circumstances like rape or transfusions, of course. (And it oughtn’t to be necessary to make that reservation but there’s always some nimrod who brings it up in the hopes that there’s somebody else in the room whose two-digit IQ is lower than his. Sheesh.)

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There’s a step in the right direction. Now if we can just wean them from socialism and immigrantophilia….

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Yeah, it’s impressive, but … some people just have too much time on their hands.