Read it.

The latest episode comes courtesy of Silvestre Reyes, Chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. In a letter leaked to the press on Wednesday, he claims the agency “misled” Congress about its activities after 9/11. Recall that this all started when Speaker Nancy Pelosi insisted the CIA failed to brief her in 2002 about aggressive interrogations during her time on Intelligence earlier this decade. CIA Director Leon Panetta in May said the agency didn’t, as policy or practice, “mislead Congress.” Briefing notes from the time showed Mrs. Pelosi was told and didn’t object to waterboarding. The CIA this week felt compelled to issue another denial in response to the Reyes letter.

There’s apparently no limit to how far Speaker Pelosi’s friends on the Hill are willing to go to salvage her reputation. The intentions are transparent enough. The Reyes letter was addressed to Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on Intelligence. Mr. Hoekstra yesterday said the media received the missive before he did. And two days after the Panetta testimony last month, six Democratic Members of the committee called on the CIA Director to “correct” his statement in May that the CIA doesn’t lie to Congress. He didn’t. The six are allies of Speaker Pelosi. Her public standing — and poll numbers — have been battered since her run-in with Mr. Panetta and the facts this spring.

Congress claims it needs to better monitor Presidential intelligence decisions. But the real lesson of the last few years is that Congress wants to know about, and often second-guess, intelligence decisions without being responsible for the result. Mrs. Pelosi could have objected to waterboarding but didn’t at the time, becoming a critic only when it became a political uproar. Senator Jay Rockefeller could have resisted warrantless wiretaps of al Qaeda but instead wrote a letter and stuck it in a drawer.

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

Read it.

If New Yorkers fantasize that doing business here in Los Angeles would be less of a headache, forget about it. This city is fast becoming a job-killing machine. It’s no accident the unemployment rate is a frightening 11.4% and climbing.

But we have no choice. The city’s bureaucrats rival Stalin’s apparatchiks in issuing decrees, rescinding them, and then punishing citizens for having followed them in the first place.

Read it.

Umar Abdulayev was brought to Guantanamo in the earliest crude Camp X-Ray days. Now, ”he’s told us he’d rather stay another seven years in Guantanamo than go back to Tajikistan,” said Chicago attorney Matthew J. O’Hara.

More inconvenient truth.

Read it.

INDISCRIMINATE gluttons and discerning gourmands alike have long been crazy for pizza. But over the last few years, they have elevated their passion to a vocation, sending pizza into a whole new stratosphere of respect. It isn’t just loved, and it isn’t just devoured. It’s scrutinized and fetishized, with a Palin-esque power to polarize.

They actually pay people to write this stuff.

Read it.

“Even if the Americans remain nowhere but a small spot in the Iraqi desert … so every Muslim should battle them until they are expelled,” the voice, reported to be Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, head of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq, said in the recording posted on a website used by jihadists.

Note that this struggle is not characterized as a political or ethnic struggle, but explicitly as a religious struggle.

Islam is the only religion on earth that has adherents killing other people on the basis of religion.

The only one.

Read it.

How appropriate.

Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

For serious UI geeks, one way to see an intelligent control interface is as a false affordance – like a knob that cannot be turned, or a chair that cannot be sat in. The worst kind of false affordance is an unreliable affordance – a knob that can be turned except when it can’t, a chair that’s a cozy place to sit except when it rams a hidden metal spike deep into your tender parts.

Like most hubristic UIs, Wolfram Alpha is operating with a completely fictitious user narrative. The raison d’etre of the natural-language interface, stated baldly, is to create a usable tool for stupid people who might be confused or intimidated by a tree of menus. The market of stupid people is indeed enormous. The market of stupid people who like to use data-visualization tools is, well, not. (And since the interface is not in fact easy but actually quite difficult, it achieves the coveted status of a non-solution to a non-problem.)

But for the actual developers, this compensation mechanism is far more effective. The actual developers (a) have enormous experience with the hubristic UI, (b) have enormous patience with its flaws, and (c) most important, know how it actually works. So their internal model can be, and typically is, orders of magnitude better than that of any naive user. So the product actually seems to work for them, and does. Unfortunately, it’s hard to make money by selling a product to yourself.

I love you, man.

Read it.

I wonder whether he yelled “Fire!” in a Tommy Smothers voice?

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

Darwin Award nominee.

Unfortunately, his girlfriend is pregnant, so at least some of the defective genes might escape.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Read it.

Ayn Rand once again anticipates modern social science: Critics of the free market are more neurotic (i.e. lower in Stability) than proponents.

People low in Stability, on the other hand, habitually blow minor problems out of proportion.  Even when they live in First World countries, they manage to convince themselves that the sky is falling.  Their typically neurotic response is to beg for Big Brother to save them from their largely imaginary problems.  When government solutions don’t work out, they misinterpret it as further proof that life is hopeless – not that their “solutions” were ill-conceived.

Steve Sailer points and laughs.

Like I’ve been saying since last August, Biden is “kind of a bozo,” which is fine in a Senator or blogger or whatever, but not so fine in a Vice President, especially when he’s talking foreign policy, because foreigners might not realize he’s just Old Joe Biden running off at the mouth again, but might take what he says seriously on the assumption that he’s, like, you know, the Vice President of the United States of America. (As a commenter points out, Biden was brought on board specifically to impart foreign policy gravitas to the newcomer from the South Side of Chicago.)

Read it.

Well, be prepared, that’s what I always say….

Tim Kidwell does an English usage rant.

If you’re like me, at the end of the day you’re tired. You’re not looking for a fight, but you’ll stand your ground if you think you’re being played. And that’s precisely the limit I’ve reached with this sprig of verbal parsley.

Fun to see such a thing in a major publication. If you can only afford one newspaper, the Wall Street Journal is the one to get.

Read it.

Even in Washington, it’s unusual to see an actual price tag placed on a chance to “alter the debate,” as the Post’s flier tastefully put it. Stranger still is it to see the city’s scourge of public corruption — the Post broke the Watergate story and the Walter Reed scandal, among others — seemingly offering its own good offices for hire.

One hand washes the other. The separate components of The Hive work together like any other form of social insect.

Read it.

“Attacks inside Alaska and largely invisible to the national media had paralyzed her administration,” someone close to the governor told me. “She was fully aware she would be branded a ‘quitter.’ She did not want to disappoint her constituents, but she was no longer able to do the job she had been elected to do. Essentially, the taxpayers were paying for Sarah to go to work every day and defend herself.”

Since Ms. Palin returned to Alaska after the 2008 campaign, some 150 FOIA requests have been filed and her office has been targeted for investigation by everyone from the FBI to the Alaska legislature. Most have centered on Ms. Palin’s use of government resources, and to date have turned up little save for a few state trips that she agreed to reimburse the state for because her children had accompanied her. In the process, though, she accumulated $500,000 in legal fees in just the last nine months, and knew the bill would grow ever larger in the future.

Read it.

Soon to be a Peter Jackson movie?

Read it.

And explains it in terms so simple that even Democrats ought to be able to follow along.

One key thing to remember is that there’s a big difference between a situation where the government is a sizeable buyer/producer, and one where the government is essentially the only buyer/producer.  In the latter case, the market still works, even if the government presence distorts it–prices are set by supply and demand, research is done, and so forth.  Indeed, it is not well appreciated on the left how dependent Medicare is on private insurers to tell them what the competitive price is for the treatments and products it pays for–if the private sector went away, Medicare would have to develop some sort of pricing system, and so would all the health care systems abroad.  Once the government becomes the dominant player, however, everything changes.

Right now, the US has a market–no matter how screwed up–for medical goods.  It is not a good market.  But no one in the market, except Medicare, has enough pricing power to totally undermine the market mechanism, so it grinds out an equilibrium that bears some resemblance to consumer demand.  In turn, Europe can buy those market-produced products.  But if you kill the last market, everything suddenly looks very different.  What’s the right price for innovation?  What should we research?  Those questions stop being decided on the basis of the number of consumers served, and start being decided on the basis of who has the best lobby.

It’s not uncommon for Americans getting treatment in Europe to be asked “You’d never be able to afford this in America, right?” by their doctors and nurses, when “this” is stitches or antibiotics.  I’d be terrified of switching places with an American too, if American health care were actually one eighth as bad as most Europeans seem to believe.  Yet despite that, as far as I know the net migration is actually the other way.

Read it.

Mr Vaughan-Evans, who was in his late seventies, was killed on the eve of his wife Jean’s 80th birthday.

“She is frail and in a wheelchair from a previous attack, also in their home,” he said.

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.

Read it.

The elephant-in-the-room irony is that the liberal cause is supposed to be about improving the prospects and economic security of ordinary Americans, whose beliefs and intelligence liberals so often enjoy deriding.

Thus, higher education is remedial education, and the affliction it remedies is an American upbringing.

The professors, by contrast, expect to be deferred to, not to be the ones deferring. Their “intellectual arrogance” is a consequence of the assumptions of progressivism, an ism that treats progress as the fundamental reality. The belief in progress is the belief that the present is better and wiser than the past, and the future will be better and wiser than the present. Truths outside of history, such as the laws of nature and nature’s God, either don’t exist, can’t be known, or don’t matter. Unlike the Marxist, the progressive does not believe history is following a defined path to a specific, inevitable conclusion. Rather, the evolution of human society is constant and eternal. Its entirety is unknowable, the idea that it has an ultimate destination a complete misconception, but history’s next phase can be discerned by some better than others.

We see here all the basic elements, employed for the past 28 years, of liberal condescension. Every issue of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone makes clear that the policy positions of George W. Bush, Republicans and conservatives in general are wicked and stupid. The real problem, however, is that everything about these people—where they reside, what they believe, how they live, work, recreate, talk and think—is in irredeemably bad taste. To embark on a conversation with one of them, based on straight-faced openness to the possibility of learning something interesting or important, would be like choosing to vacation in Wichita instead of Tuscany.

Read it.

Did human evolution really stop? If not, our sense of who we are — and how we got this way — may be radically altered. Messrs. Cochran and Harpending, both scientists themselves, dismiss the standard view. Far from ending, they say, evolution has accelerated since humans left Africa 40,000 years ago and headed for Europe and Asia.

Read it.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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

Tim Matheson and Tom Selleck both tested for Indiana Jones; Karen Allen actually screentested with Tim Matheson. Tom Selleck did very well and was the frontrunner, but had to bow out due to Magnum P.I. Harrison Ford was brought up early in the casting discussion, but George Lucas wanted to avoid casting him since he had already become so closely associated with Star Wars.

Selleck would have been great.

Read it.

Just in case your World of Warcraft account is somehow unavailable.

Read it.

The Japanese are actually an alien species. Here’s proof.

Read it.

Too much television really is bad for you.

Read it.

And who could blame them?

Read it.

The media and political pundits refuse to see this gap between the state’s budget and its ability to pay as an essential issue.

But the fundamental problem remains. California’s economy–once wondrously diverse with aerospace, high-tech, agriculture and international trade–has run aground. Burdened by taxes and ever-growing regulation, the state is routinely rated by executives as having among the worst business climates in the nation. No surprise, then, that California’s jobs engine has sputtered, and it may be heading toward 15% unemployment.

Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect. Rinse. Repeat. Go bankrupt.

Read it.

Speaking to the American Medical Association last month, President Obama waxed enthusiastic about countries that “spend less” than the U.S. on health care. He’s right that many countries do, but what he doesn’t want to explain is how they ration care to do it.

While the guidelines are complex, NICE currently holds that, except in unusual cases, Britain cannot afford to spend more than about $22,000 to extend a life by six months. Why $22,000? It seems to be arbitrary, calculated mainly based on how much the government wants to spend on health care. That figure has remained fairly constant since NICE was established and doesn’t adjust for either overall or medical inflation.

The NICE precedent also undercuts the Obama Administration’s argument that vast health savings can be gleaned simply by automating health records or squeezing out “waste.” Britain has tried all of that but ultimately has concluded that it can only rein in costs by limiting care. The logic of a health-care system dominated by government is that it always ends up with some version of a NICE board that makes these life-or-death treatment decisions. The Administration’s new Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research currently lacks the authority of NICE. But over time, if the Obama plan passes and taxpayer costs inevitably soar, it could quickly gain it.

Read it.

The 1996 murder of seven French Catholic monks in Algeria, called the Martyrs of Atlas because of the Atlas mountains where their monastery was located, was not the work of Islamist militants as officially stated at the time, according to testimony by a retired French general to an inquiry into the killings.

In fact, he told a closed-door inquiry in Paris, Algerian troops in a helicopter inadvertently gunned down the Trappists when they strafed an isolated camp they believed belonged to the radical Armed Islamic Group (GIA) that was battling the Algerian state at the time. When they landed to inspect the scene, the troops found the bullet-ridden bodies of the monks who had been kidnapped two months beforehand. Algeria then concocted the story that the Islamists had slit the monks’ throats to hide their fatal blunder.

The GIA has a sordid part in this story, as they apparently abducted the monks after the Trappists had been kidnapped by Algerian agents in a complicated plot. But if these testimonies are correct, the monks did not die at the hands of Islamists who slit their throats, as the official Algerian explanation has it.

Truth will out.

Read it.

Read it.

The AHA advised people untrained in CPR to help heart attack victims by compressing their chests 100 times a minute, and that “Stayin’ Alive” thumps along at a convenient 103 beats per minute. Just as importantly, nearly every American born in the last half-century knows it by heart.

Read it.

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

Read it.

It will only take about ten years for the bureaucrats to catch up.

There’s probably a fat Ph.D. dissertation in cataloging all of the laws that enshrine outmoded science.

Read it.

Soon to be the perfect Democrat party candidate. All white, of course.

Read it.

Yet another reason not to play cricket.

Read it.

In the age of YouTube, there simply is no excuse for people who refuse to grasp the Muslim agenda for the free world.

Read it.

Telling the school that the children were related to European royalty and that his brother was a senior Army officer, the father is said to have asked for permission – which was granted – to pick up his children inside the two schools attended by his eldest children.

However, one of the head teachers went to the police because of her “concerns”.

Lord Monckton, who has investigated the allegations, described the episode as “the worst case of child abduction by social services that I have ever come across”.

He accused a social worker and a police officer, both female, of plotting together against the couple, who live in the east of England.

The father has told the peer that when he was asked to accompany her, he demanded to see her identification but she refused to show him. He claims he was then hancuffed by two police officers.

His wife was also detained when she went to remonstrate, and their youngest child was taken away screaming, according to the family’s account. Later all three children were taken into care.

Good thing they weren’t Mormons — they’d never get their kids back.

Read it.

They are the traditional pleasures of a British summer fair. But the spin of the tombola and the fun of the coconut shy are being eclipsed by the rustle of paperwork and the shuffle of the inspector’s footsteps.

Village fete organisers say they are having to cancel events because volunteers are struggling to cope with the demands of officialdom.

Saw that comin’.

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

Read it.

From Megan McArdle, who is finally getting off the dime and marrying Peter Suderman.

Read it.

Works for me.

Better yet, let’s put a stake through his heart, cut off his head, and fill his mouth with garlic.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

I have, I think, made clear that I think these new uniforms a striking illustration of Bureaucracy Gone Bad. Seaman has stupid idea = nobody cares; Admiral has stupid idea = everybody suffers.

Across military blogs, participants have blasted the uniforms for too closely resembling the combat uniforms of the Army and Marines that have become ubiquitous military symbols in media coverage of the land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Others questioned the purpose of wearing a woodland camouflage pattern while aboard a ship.

Well, when you get knocked over into the water, you need a uniform that will make sure you can’t be seen or, you know, like, rescued.

The absurdity of wearing a camouflage uniform on board a ship ought to be obvious to the most retarded of people, but Admirals are apparently less bright even than that. We went through the same Happy Horseshit when Zumwalt was CNO; it took about ten years, but the Navy eventually went back to the old practical uniforms once the morons retired.

Read it.

“We plan to use the sequence to establish a breeding programme for bluefin tuna as most aquaculture farmers presently use wild juveniles,” he said. “We want to establish a complete aquaculture system that will produce fish that have good strength, are resistant to disease, grow quickly and taste delicious.”

Somehow, I don’t think his name will be Charlie.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Read it.

Yeah, the article is about Southern Baptists, but the map is fascinating. Southern Baptists are second only to Roman Catholics — and not far behind them, either — in the number of counties in which they are the largest religious group.

Mainline church leaders may struggle to grasp this, but the most ethnically diverse churches in America are found in these three bodies — the Roman Catholic Church, the Assemblies of God and, yes, the Southern Baptist Convention.

Read it.

The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to be pausible.

Read it.

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