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

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Cathy, this one’s for you.

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Speed the day.

George Will has Barack Obama’s number.

In August our ubiquitous president became the nation’s elevator music, always out and about, heard but not really listened to, like audible wallpaper. And now, as Congress returns to resume wrestling with health care reform, we shall see if he continues his August project of proving that the idea of an Ivy League Huey Long is not oxymoronic.

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…which is perhaps why we ought not to take artists seriously when they talk about politics.

Hitler’s deluded view of himself as a genius is based on the confused system of thought emerging in the late 19th century, which centered on the idea that a genius — a strong personality who outshone everything else — could do anything and could do anything he pleased.

Sounds like a Kennedy.

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

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The charts are especially interesting.

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The real thing, this time: leaked British diplomatic correspondence published in the London Times appears to make it clear that Great Britain let Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi go in order to finalize an oil deal with Libya….

So where are all the Hollywood celebs with their Concerned T-shirts? Barbra? Viggo?

Apart from anything else, it is an argument for the death penalty. We simply can’t trust any Western government to be immune from bribery.

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Hey, if it were easy, anybody could do it. Oh, wait….

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Merely reinforcing what John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, always says: “Get a government job!”

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According to a researcher with anti-spam company Cloudmark, 419 fraudsters have been relaying a “significant” amount of messages through the democrats.org domain name. The abuse, which dates back at least to the beginning of this month, helps evade filters that internet service providers employ to block the messages.

Birds of a feather….

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

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Hence the moustaches you see in all those old Romans-versus-barbarians paintings.

(Well, that’s my theory; what’s your theory?)

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A 10-year-old homeschool girl described as “well liked, social and interactive with her peers, academically promising and intellectually at or superior to grade level” has been told by a New Hampshire court official to attend a government school because she was too “vigorous” in defense of her Christian faith.

New Hampshire is now officially a Blue State.

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Using a CMOS sensor to take almost instant readings, the vein scanner is deadly accurate — the chances of it authorizing the wrong person are a million to one.

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Google has anointed an “approved list” of writers it thinks you should read. But not only is Google’s choice far from “Neutral” – there’s no libertarians, merely one (shrieky and not very representative) conservative, and a preponderance of Greens – there isn’t a Google critic amongst them. Well, there goes “neutrality”.

The tech pundits Google chooses are safe, flavourless, humourless, and uniformly Google-friendly – it’s a list of Google’s trusted pals, really. If you locked them in a room with some drugs, by the end of the evening you’d have heard no new original insight or wit – and the drugs would be untouched. For example, Chris “Long Tail” Anderson tops the list. Do you need to know more?

Jerry Pournelle runs what may be the original blog and always has interesting things to say.

On education, the usual critique of charter schools is that they are guilty of “cherry picking” which is to say, they accept only students who want to learn something and are willing to be disciplined. Thus an academically accomplished charter school in DC was not allowed. Cherry picking is supposed to be a bad thing? As opposed to the current practice of making those who would like to learn in DC go to a school that accepts those who do not want to learn and refuse to be disciplined? And this from people who are supposed to be liberal? It seems to me a very good way to keep the blacks in their place. Make them go to lousy schools filled with disorder while you send yours to schools that have discipline, and then on to Harvard. Is that the goal of liberalism? To keep the blacks down? Because I think of no better way to accomplish that goal than what is happening in DC. Tons of money spent on truly horrible schools that no one who could possibly escape them would go to? Would anyone who had in mind the good of black children in DC permit the current school system there to exist for ten minutes more?

The money is spent, and the results are known, and nothing is to be done. Yet under the Constitution the Congress is responsible. One presumes that both parties intend the results obtained since neither party makes any attempt to do anything about it.

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What does that say about tadpoles and frogs?

Megan McArdle is always worth reading.

First of all, as it shows in the articles I linked earlier, something like 90% of homicides are committed by people with criminal records, i.e. people who probably cannot legally own a gun. A lot of the rest are committed by juveniles, or mentally unstable people, who also cannot legally own a gun.

It is perfectly true that adding a gun to a dispute involving violent criminals increases the likelihood that someone will be shot.  But violent criminals are not like the rest of us.  They have very poor impulse control, and, well, a demonstrated willingness to use violence.  They also are not likely to apply for a permit before packing heat.

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The 48-year-old, who can’t be named for legal reasons, is demanding unlimited damages of more than £300,000 from his ex-wife and her lover, for the distress caused and the cost of bringing up the children he believed were his for more than a decade.

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Am I right that the Ninth Circuit’s Fourth Amendment decision in United States v. Comprehensive Drug Testing has rendered every computer search warrant that has ever been obtained — and every offsite search — unconstitutional? I’ve been working in this area for over a decade, and I have never heard of a case that satisfies the Ninth Circuit’s new procedural standards.

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It’s twue, it’s twue.

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A series of marking found etched in the Stirling Heads, a set of carvings in one of Scotland’s largest castles, may be 16th century harp music, according to academics.

Watch it.

A peek behind the scenes. It’s hell when the Oppressed Masses don’t play along.

If it’s not a conspiracy, it’s the next best thing.

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A study in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology finds that many more animals have appendixes than was thought, and that the appendix is not merely a remnant of a digestive organ called the cecum. All of which means that the appendix might not be so useless.

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The supreme court in Argentina has ruled that it is unconstitutional to punish people for using marijuana for personal consumption.

This will be interesting.

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Not that you would know it by listening to the enviro-fascists.

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Can he use a litter box? Can he clean himself? That’s the key.

Gotta love Australians.

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Of course, pretty soon in France it will only be necessary to say “I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you”, so it doesn’t really matter.

Foud Ajami nails it.

A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the “loudest voices” are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed.

The Obama devotees were the victims of their own belief in political magic. The devotees could not make up their minds. In a newly minted U.S. senator from Illinois, they saw the embodiment of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Like Lincoln, Mr. Obama was tall and thin and from Illinois, and the historic campaign was launched out of Springfield. The oath of office was taken on the Lincoln Bible. Like FDR, he had a huge economic challenge, and he better get it done, repair and streamline the economy in his “first hundred days.” Like JFK, he was young and stylish, with a young family.

A must-read.

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Need to evacuate people quickly through a narrow opening? Put something in their way.

Physicists timed a crowd of 50 women as they exited as fast as possible through a door, and then repeated the experiment with a 20-centimetre-wide pillar placed 65 centimetres in front of the exit to the left-hand side.

The obstacle improved the exit rate by an extra seven people per minute – from 2.8 people to 2.92 people per second.

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One might still ask why the power-seekers tend to predominate over those who place a higher value on the public good. The key explanation is selection effects. A politician willing to do anything to take and hold on to power will have a crucial edge over an opponent who imperils his chances of getting elected in order to advance the public interest. The former type is likely to prevail over the latter far more often than not. This is especially true in a political environment where most voters are often ignorant and irrational about government and public policy. Candidates have strong incentives to pander to this ignorance and exploit it in order to win elections. Those unwilling to exploit public ignorance because they place the public interest above political success are likely to be at a serious disadvantage relative to their less scrupulous opponents. Thus, those who value power above other objectives are more likely to succeed politically. As economist Frank Knight wrote back in the 1930s, “[t]he probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping master in a slave plantation.”

Not a very complicated notion, but apparently some people have to have Gresham’s Law explained in simple terms.

Darwin Award nominee.

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Let’s hope they didn’t put it on 8″ floppies.

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Ambrose Bierce had some language issues.

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An excellent breakdown — no pun intended — of federal receipts and expenditures, with some nifty graphics.

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I’ve been wondering when somebody would catch on to this.

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If you can’t get a Government Job, working for one of these companies is probably the next best thing.

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Ah, more of that right-wing vigilante-ism … oh, wait a minute….

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It’s not often that bacteria make water more drinkable, but a new microbial desalination cell does precisely that. The proof-of-principle system removed 90 per cent of the salt from a seawater-like solution.

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Oh, surely they can do better than that….

Nat Hentoff shivers.

I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama’s desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model) — as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill — decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It’s already in the stimulus bill signed into law.

The Obama Nation is starting to scare even left-wing media bloviators.

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The late Robert Crunden got to the heart of Progressive faith when he discovered that almost all American Progressives were raised in Calvinist homes and, under the influence of some combination of the men and women of Croly’s moment, lost their Christianity and replaced it with some form of what they thought of as “science.” Democracy, activated through science, became what religion once was. Seeing a world that had changed so much since about 1850 — Henry Adams said that a boy born in 1850 was born closer to the year zero than to 1900 — and a generation that had conquered the night (electricity), geography (trains and automobiles and airplanes) and even nature itself, which was for the first time vulnerable to the whims and ambitions of human reason, Progressives had some grounds for their optimism about their belief in “mastery” as opposed to “drift,” as Walter Lippmann put it.

The swine.

Everything hums along like clockwork as long as consumers consume. A wrench is thrown into the entire affair if consumers choose not to spend. And so, we find economists worrying that the genius of the stimulus is threatened by a reticence among Americans to open their wallets. This, of course, raises a whole set of further questions: what would happen to the economy if Americans began to barter for, rather than purchase, at least some of the things they need? What if neighbors began, say, sharing mowers, roto-tillers, ladders, and other tools rather than filling every garage in the neighborhood with same items? What if more Americans began growing some of their own food, making do with one car rather than two, eating at home, and generally attempting to live lives characterized by simplicity and frugality? If Americans are already beginning to make changes in this direction, are they recklessly threatening the economic recovery?

Andrew Breitbart looks at the SWPL clientele of Whole Foods.

Everywhere one looks these days, the intolerance of self-avowed liberals is on display. Especially since Mr. Obama came to power.

The purportedly open-minded and empathic among us who now run everything – save for NASCAR and Nashville – openly wage war against those who dare disagree.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

If you think of CIA less as the puppet-master of world history and more as merely one well-funded player in an international version of the municipal Favor Bank familiar from Bonfire of the Vanities and The Wire, then the idea that Obama got help from CIA-connected individuals along the way seems less shocking and more plausible. He’s not the Manchurian Candidate, he’s just a kid whose parents exploited Cold War tensions to get him a favor or two.