Steve Sailer never hesitates to grasp the nettle firmly.

The Pashtun are disagreeable bad-tempered back-stabbers. But, they live there. And we don’t.

Read it. Apparently Apple is discovering what customers of AT&T (formerly Cingular, not to be confused with the Old AT&T, which was a great company before Cingular bought it and screwed it up) have known all along — AT&T service sucks, and that spills over onto the iPhone.

I’d dearly love to have an iPhone but I will not deal with AT&T, and Apple needs to think hard about its partnership with one of the worst companies in an industry notorious for poor customer satisfaction.

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Driving a SmugMobile can get expensive. That is, if you survive.

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“John” and “Mary” are always safe choices. “DeWayne” and “Leticia” — uh, not so much.

Meanwhile, in the Washington Post, an essayist wrote about staring at her one month old daughter and realizing “Oh man. We gave our kid the wrong name.” (She ended up changing the child’s name to Summer from Presley.)

Yeah, that’s an improvement.

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Sounds as if they have the same hiring practices as DART.

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Last week, Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.) contacted General Motors CEO Fritz Henderson. He wasn’t happy with GM’s decision to close a distribution center in his district. He asked Mr. Henderson to reconsider.

Mr. Frank controls the funds upon which GM’s survival depends. His request was immediately approved, and the facility will stay open for at least another 14 months.

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

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It won’t be enough for the envirofascists, but it sounds encouraging.

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A woman gave birth in a car as it drove along a motorway after being sent home twice that day by a hospital because she wasn’t ready.

(Perhaps by “not ready”, they meant that she had neglected to marry the child’s father.)

But of course Britain’s National Health Service is far superior to the American system, and a model for what the Obamassiah would like the American health care system to be.

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Whatever would we do without scientists?

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Because that’s where the power is.

You can (a) make a lot of money but have a non-trivial chance of going to jail and/or being denounced nationwide, or (b) make less money but have a lot more actual power and a guarantee that you can’t be fired and won’t ever spend a day in jail. Which would you choose?

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Security theater is the best you can hope for.

Another reason why I don’t fly.

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Perhaps that’s why we’ll never get rid of government.

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So they’re handling Britain’s heritage the same way they’re handling Britain’s health care.

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That’s going to make one hell of a souvenir.

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A former partner of Miss Mallinson, whose children are from four fathers, told The Sun newspaper that her oldest son had discovered her affair after overhearing her telling Caban she loved him.

You can’t make this stuff up.

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One of the few remaining US clinics that provided controversial late-term abortions will close in the wake of its owner’s murder.

So the murder appears to have been effective in accomplishing its object, to stop late term abortions from that clinic.

It is not clear whether the two remaining clinics will be able to absorb Mr Tiller’s caseload, Ms Jones said, and it’s possible some women may end up dying because they could not access the highly-specialised procedure.

And, of course, if that actually happens, no doubt we’ll be the first to know.

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“Saved or created” has become the signature phrase for Barack Obama as he describes what his stimulus is doing for American jobs. His latest invocation came yesterday, when the president declared that the stimulus had already saved or created at least 150,000 American jobs — and announced he was ramping up some of the stimulus spending so he could “save or create” an additional 600,000 jobs this summer. These numbers come in the context of an earlier Obama promise that his recovery plan will “save or create three to four million jobs over the next two years.”

What? You mean the Obamassiah lied to us? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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

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I know how she feels.

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

Francis Fukuyama likes Shop Class as Soulcraft.

“Shop Class as Soulcraft” is a beautiful little book about human excellence and the way it is undervalued in contemporary America.

Matthew B. Crawford, who owns and operates a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Va., and serves as a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, notes that all across the United States, high school shop classes teaching mechanical arts like welding, woodworking or carpentry are closing down, to free up funds for computer labs.

Question: Were Crawford not a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advance Studies in Culture — were his claim to fame merely owning and operating a motorcycle repair shop — would Professor Fukuyama be as smitten with what Crawford has to say? I suspect that he would not.

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Not long ago, I would have applauded this type of government expansion. Born and raised in Canada, I once believed that government health care is compassionate and equitable. It is neither.

My views changed in medical school. Yes, everyone in Canada is covered by a “single payer” — the government. But Canadians wait for practically any procedure or diagnostic test or specialist consultation in the public system.

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He was a courtly State Department intelligence analyst from a prominent family who loved to sail and peruse the London Review of Books. Occasionally, he would voice frustration with U.S. policies, but to his liberal neighbors in Northwest D.C. it was nothing out of the ordinary. “We were all appalled by the Bush years,” one said.

And that pretty much tells you all you need to know about our modern American functionary class. As with Britain in the 1930s, fashionable socialism among the establishment adolescentia leads to disaffection when those in charge of the government persist in acting like grownups, which moves fairly smoothly into treason.

If we were to automatically imprison the entire graduating class of the top ten U.S. universities, the nation would come out ahead in the long run.

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I’d like a fence, please. Sooner would be better than later.

On the border between California and the rest of the country would do nicely.

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So why are behavioral geneticists so eager to downplay the practical relevance of their field?  The most plausible explanation is that these scientists already have enough trouble with political correctness.  They don’t want to amplify their public relations problem by pointing out that their science undermines a bunch of popular, feel-good policies.

Critics of behavioral genetics are prone to hyperbole, but they do have good reason to fear this science.  It really does undermine a lot of their sacred cows.  Example: If differences in talent – not differences in opportunities – explain the inter-generational income correlation, people with normal values will conclude that a lot of redistribution is unjustified.  “Giving everyone a chance to realize his potential,” isn’t the only rationale for redistribution, but it is an important one.  If people admitted that family environment has little effect on economic success in our society, there is every reason to expect a decline in support for redistributive policies.

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I have no idea whether — or how — this actually works, but it looks really cool.

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The Democratic Party’s attitude to elections is admirable: Win. And recent history has shown it will do anything to do so.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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Did anyone among all those who busied themselves with draft after draft after draft of The Speech That Will Live In Infamy check those Qur’anic quotes? Did they understand that those who knew the text would, as Robert Spencer devastatingly did the other day at this site, recognize the plucking completely out of context of a phrase or two from what turned out to be bloodcurdling passages from the Qur’an? Did they not realize that it did not take Spencer, but that you and I, and practically anyone at this point, could see that the quoting of 5.32 without 5.33 was simply to repeat the hideous misunderstanding of that misunderestimator of Islam, George Bush?

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Hint: No.

“There is far more violence in the Bible than in the Qur’an; the idea that Islam imposed itself by the sword is a Western fiction, fabricated during the time of the Crusades when, in fact, it was Western Christians who were fighting brutal holy wars against Islam.”[1] So announces former nun and self-professed “freelance monotheist,” Karen Armstrong. This quote sums up the single most influential argument currently serving to deflect the accusation that Islam is inherently violent and intolerant: All monotheistic religions, proponents of such an argument say, and not just Islam, have their fair share of violent and intolerant scriptures, as well as bloody histories. Thus, whenever Islam’s sacred scriptures—the Qur’an first, followed by the reports on the words and deeds of Muhammad (the Hadith)—are highlighted as demonstrative of the religion’s innate bellicosity, the immediate rejoinder is that other scriptures, specifically those of Judeo-Christianity, are as riddled with violent passages.

The truth is that the “violence” in the Bible is in the Old Testament, and isn’t of the “go forth and conquer the world” type that Islam promotes. And there’s no sponsorship of violence — indeed, not even any endorsement of it; quite the contrary — in the New Testament. So this is “cultural equivalence” meme is all bullshit promoted by ignorant partisans.

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

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And I’m sure that will make a difference.

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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There you go — change you can believe in.

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Guess that Obama Apology Tour really worked, didn’t it?

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The UN publicizes such positive rights as “right to water,” “right to housing,” “right to health”, etc. These rights sound wonderful, while not imposing any specific obligation whatsoever on any specific actor to do any specific thing for any specific poor person. It is impossible for the UN or any other body to allocate responsibilities for observing the “right to water,” and also decide who will be first in line among the 884 million people now without clean water. So even if the UN creates international pressure to observe these “rights,” the pressure is diffused across so many potential actors with unclear responsibility that it has no effect, accomplishing nothing for poor people.

So such victims could appeal to the UN Human Rights Council for their rights vis-à-vis the governments of Cameroon, China, and Egypt – except that the governments of Cameroon, China, and Egypt are MEMBERS of the UN Human Rights Council. The UN is perpetrating a sick joke on such victims, by filling the Human Rights Council with human rights violators. This travesty is already well known, but that doesn’t mean anyone who cares should stop talking about it.

So here’s the scorecard on UN human rights. On something like “the right to water,” where it is impossible to identify who is violating such “rights,” the UN talks big. On human rights violations like killings and torture, where the UN knows precisely who is the violator, the UN sometimes shows up on the violator’s side.

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“If information cannot be freely exchanged, if journalists must fear being sued over information reported in good faith on matters crucial to our defense, matters such as the financial networks supporting jihadist terror, then we cannot make sound security policy,” former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said at a recent conference on “libel lawfare.” This is a useful term to describe lawsuits to suppress facts about radical Islam and terrorism.

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Last Sunday, late-term abortion doctor George Tiller was gunned down in the foyer of his Lutheran church, where he served as an usher. As anyone with even a cursory understanding of Lutheranism in America could surmise, that church was a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Of the various Lutheran church bodies in America, the ELCA is the most mainline and has the most supportive position on legalized abortion.

What none of these stories have explained is that Tiller had previously been excommunicated by a Lutheran congregation on account of his lack of repentance about and refusal to stop his occupation. That Lutheran congregation was a member of my church body, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Excommunication doesn’t happen terribly frequently in this day and age but it’s not unheard of. I don’t know any of the specifics about his past congregation or what led to the discipline and anticipated learning more about it when it was covered by the mainstream media. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened.

There is obviously quite a difference between a church body that would discipline a practicing abortion doctor and one that would welcome him in membership.

No shit.

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You knew it had to happen.

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The Federal Reserve announced a $1.2 trillion plan three months ago designed to push down mortgage rates and breathe life into the housing market.

But this and other big government spending programs are turning out to have the opposite effect.

Gosh, imagine that.

Yields on 10-year Treasury notes, a benchmark for home mortgages and other consumers loans, jumped from 2.5 percent in March around the time of the Fed announcement to as high as 3.7 percent in recent days as signs that efforts to stabilize the financial system and economy were starting to pay off. And 30-year mortgage rates jumped more than a quarter-point this week to 5.29 percent, the highest level since December, Freddie Mac reported.

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Well, I’m hoping….

Cringely thinks it through.

Forget for the moment about data incursions within the DC beltway, what happens when  Pakistan takes down the Internet in India?  Here we have technologically sophisticated regional rivals who have gone to war periodically for six decades.  There will be more wars between these two. And to think that Pakistan or India are incapable or unlikely to take such action against the Internet is simply naive.  The next time these two nations fight YOU KNOW there will be a cyber component to that war.

A strategic component of any such attack would be to hobble tech services in both economies by destroying source code repositories.  And an interesting aspect of destroying such repositories — in Third World countries OR in the U.S. — is that the logical bet is to destroy them all without regard to what they contain, which for the most part negates any effort to obscure those contents.

Try to do a security audit of Argentina or Bangladesh and see what nightmare is unveiled.  Yet this is exactly where major international companies are deploying more and more technical resources.

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The history of socialism is the history of failure—and so is the history of capitalism, but in a different sense. For the history of socialism is one of fundamental failure, a failure to provide incentives and an inability to coordinate information about supply and effective demand. The history of capitalism, by contrast, is the history of dialectical failure: it is a history of the creation of new institutions and practices that may be successful, even transformative for a while, but which eventually prove dysfunctional, either because their intrinsic weaknesses become more evident over time or because of a change in external circumstances. Historically, these institutional failures have led to two reactions. They lead to governmental attempts to reform corporate and financial institutions, through changes in law and regulation (such as limited liability laws, creation of the FDIC, the SEC, etc.). They also lead market institutions to reform themselves, as investors and managers learn what forms of organization and which practices are dysfunctional. The history of capitalism, then, is the history of success through dialectical failure.

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But dissident economists and investment professionals offer a much different take: Most of Washington is dead wrong.

Instead of fighting over what should go in the economic stimulus bill, pitting infrastructure spending against tax cuts and contractors against contraceptives, they say lawmakers should be fighting against the very idea of any economic stimulus at all. Call them the Do-Nothing Crowd.

“The economy was too big. It was all phantom wealth borrowed from abroad,” says Andrew Schiff, an investment consultant at Euro Pacific Capital and a card-carrying member of the stand-tall-against-the-stimulus lobby. “All this stimulus money is geared toward getting consumers spending and borrowing again. But spending and borrowing were the problem in the first place.”

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Britain’s shire horses could be extinct within a generation following a drastic drop in the number of breeders, experts have warned.

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Did you know that fair is one-to-one untranslatable into any other language–that it is distinctly Anglo in origin?

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Arizona’s founders banned gifts to private companies as the result of bitter experience. In the closing decades of the 19th century, local governments borrowed money to force-feed private railroad development. Pima County outside of Tucson, for example, took out $300,000 in bonds in 1882 for a railroad that promised to build some 100 miles of track. The money was spent but the railroad dissolved after a mere 10 miles of track was constructed. The bonds were worthless, but taxpayers were still on the hook for the money.

This time around it’s shopping malls and the like, and the preferred subsidy is tax rebates rather than bonds. But the result is the same. Local governments are foisting the cost of private development onto taxpayers as private companies promise that with just a few tax dollars they will create a wealth of new jobs.

Michelle Malkin is on the case.

It is not a pretty sight.