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Translation: “Uh-oh! Looks like the civilized nations are getting another technological advantage! We’d better get together with the other losers to tie them up with something before they start thinking they’re allowed to win!”

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Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

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This is the car that Goofy uses to ride around Disneyland.

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It always astounds people when a Communist dictatorship acts like, well, a Communist dictatorship.

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Remains of the fabled dining hall have been discovered on the city’s Palatine Hill, where emperors traditionally built their most lavish palaces.

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Trad is, quite simply, a safe haven for sartorially selective gentlemen amid the ever-growing chaos of department stores and runways.

“Trad is sort of the antithesis of what’s happening in fast fashion right now,” said Michael Williams, 30, who obsesses over classic American men’s clothing on his blog, A Continuous Lean. “It’s like the opposite of what all the men’s wear designers are doing,” Mr. Williams continued. “It’s not fashion; it’s clothes.”

J. Press safeguards the core values of our civilization.

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Even Washington’s pet Republicans can’t stomach Obama.

Obama’s rhetorical method in international contexts — given supreme expression at the United Nations this week — is a moral dialectic. The thesis: pre-Obama America is a nation of many flaws and failures. The antithesis: The world responds with understandable but misguided prejudice. The synthesis: Me. Me, at all costs; me, in spite of all terrors; me, however long and hard the road may be. How great a world we all should see, if only all were more like…me.

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Stanford University was one of the first academic institutions to come out with an iPhone app last October. Now Stanford has debuted an upgrade, dubbed iStanford, which lets students search for courses, add or drop them and see their grades.

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Gotta go with Byron on that one.

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No surprises here. “Geeks” and “tough guys” share the characteristic of not having fully grown up. Adults (age notwithstanding) don’t get tattoos. They may have some from an earlier arrested-adolescent stage of life, but we all have skeletons in our closets. I suspect that if there were some quick and easy way to remove tattoos, we wouldn’t see so many of them.

Boris Johnson is not afraid to voice the unfashionable thought.

Well, if you want to see the other side of the story, and you want to meditate on at least one powerful argument for colonialism and imperialism, you must go to the British Museum, where they have just opened a magnificent exhibition of the life of Moctezuma. There, you are invited to imagine what it was like to attend the inauguration of the latest expansion of the Great Temple, in 1506, not long before the arrival of the white man.

First, you would file past the tzompantli, the huge racks of skulls, and then towards the reeking steps of the Templo Mayor. You would be led up the steps, slippery with blood, and at the top one priest would grab you by the hair, and four others would grab each limb. Then in an instant they would flip you expertly backwards on to the sacrificial block, and though your back would be very likely broken by the impact, the last sight to delight your eyes, before you lost all brain-stem function, would have been your own still beating heart, held aloft by the priest as the snows of Popocatepetl turned pink in the evening sun.

Steve Sailer is taken aback.

Wait a minute — “the need to have more people of color, gays …”

So, there aren’t enough gays in the media?

Who knew?

Bryan Caplan points out that economics isn’t hard if it’s explained properly.

Economists often off-handedly remark that basic economics is “counterintuitive.”  In one of the papers he presented at GMU, Scott Sumner has a whole appendix on “Why is economics so counterintuitive?”  Even my hands aren’t clean here: In The Myth of the Rational Voter, I wrote that “…Smith’s thesis [the harmony of private and public interest] was counterintuitive to his contemporaries, and remains counterintuitive today.”  However, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that if basic economics seems counterintuitive, it’s being poorly explained.  If Bastiat could make econ intuitive, so can we.

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England’s Children’s Minister wants a review of the case of two police officers told they were breaking the law, caring for each other’s children.

Ofsted said the arrangement contravened the Childcare Act because it lasted for longer than two hours a day, and constituted receiving “a reward”.

I am not making this up. (Children’s Minister? Children’s Minister?)

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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And usually it’s socialism. You might say “In times like these, we have to pull together and nobody can make a profit providing a service so essential to the rest of us.” You would not say “Because it’s Tuesday and my butt itches, we have to pull together and nobody can make a profit providing this service.” With the latter, even a flaccid mind would immediately recognize — duh, hey wait a minute…if the service is so essential, how do we make sure it continues to be provided if nobody can make a profit providing it? But “In times like these” goes over like Free Ice Cream night in Hell. Why yes! That makes perfect sense!

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Oh, no! It’s happening again: the Islamic world is grievously insulted by a work of art produced by an infidel! More specifically, a French artist has showed disrespect for Muslim prayer mats.

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Something that has perplexed me for a long time is why we put up with government providing so-called public services. Ask the little people two questions and I think I know what the answers will be. “Would you send your children to an independent school if you could afford to?” “Would you use private healthcare if you could afford to do so?” There will be some who will answer in the negative on grounds of political ideology, but my guess is that the vast majority would give affirmative answers. Then ask them why they would use private-sector services and my guess is that they would say they are better than the services offered by the State. It would, of course, be fair to point out that many of the answers would not be based on direct knowledge of the superior quality of private-sector schools and hospitals (although increasing numbers are now receiving treatment in private hospitals where they have had to wait too long for a new NHS hip or the removal of a gall bladder). However, one factor cannot, in my view, be denied namely that those providing services in the private sector have to keep their standards high or they will lose customers.

It seems to me that the problem with State education and healthcare is that they are provided by the State rather than just funded by the State. It leaves them open to political interference which, as we have seen in spades, creates huge difficulties for those actually delivering the services at the bottom of the pyramid. Constant chopping and changing of performance criteria does nobody any favours. One manifestation of that problem is that a top-down nationwide system of anything requires so many layers of bureaucracy that vast sums of money are consumed passing information back and forth.

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Robert Mugabe’s wife, Grace, who has taken over at least six of Zimbabwe’s most valuable white-owned farms since 2002, sells up to a million litres of milk a year to Nestlé, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose.

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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Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee have refused to allow the final text of their health care bill to be posted online prior to their vote on it. They claim the language is too technically difficult for ordinary people to understand, so that releasing the text would just sow confusion.

More likely, the Dems don’t want people to see language like that which appears at pages 80-81 of the bill. There it says: ” “Beginning in 2015, payment [under Medicare] would be reduced by five percent if an aggregation of the physician’s resource use is at or above the 90th percentile of national utilization.” Thus, in any year in which a particular doctor’s average per-patient Medicare costs are in the top 10 percent in the nation, the feds will cut the doctor’s payments by 5 percent.”

So if a doctor authorizes care that a bureaucrat thinks is too expensive, the bureaucrat has the power to cut his reimbursement. So the doctor’s incentive is to provide cheap care in all cases, for fear of being shortchanged, since he doesn’t know what these national percentages are. Once again, we have bureaucrats second-guessing doctors. Oh, we won’t ration care! Heaven forbid. We’ll get the doctors to do it, so you can hate the doctors rather than us. If there are any doctors left after we get through with them. Death panels? We don’t need no stinkin’ death panels! Ha ha ha!

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Robert Mugabe has built up a secret farming empire from land seized from at least five white-owned businesses, a Daily Telegraph investigation has found.

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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As long as they have their papers.

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After losing his job in hotel management in 1997, Bertram Rohloff wanted to open a stand to sell sandwiches but found he could not get the necessary permits to set up shop. So instead he envisaged an evolution in food-preparation technology, a step beyond the rolling hot-dog cart, because without the necessary permits, neither the grill nor the sausages could touch the ground.

Regulation is the mother of invention? Say rather than markets work whether you want them to or not.

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Read it. And sing along with The Children if you dare.

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Eighteen months after being laid off, Judith Lederman, a 50-year-old divorcee who lives in Scarsdale, N.Y., is ready to consider jobs paying half the $120,000 she earned as a publicity manager at Lord & Taylor. That’s mostly because she’s desperate, but it also makes sense when you consider how this country punishes work effort. While the first $60,000 of her income would be lightly taxed, the next $60,000 would be hit with what is in effect a 79% tax rate. Given a choice between a part-time or easy job paying $60,000 and a demanding, stress-ridden job paying $120,000, Lederman would be wise to take the former. In the tougher job she would be contributing twice as much to the economy. But she wouldn’t be doing herself much good. It would make more sense to take it easy and spend more time with her high school senior daughter, Casey.

Just another fine day in the Obama Nation.

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

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Let’s see … stimulus money goes, not to private individuals or organizations, but to state and local governments … which are pinched for money, and so they spend it on … government programs and employees!

Saw that comin’.

Steve Sailer is never afraid to ask the hard questions.

It’s a fascinating symbiotic relationship between capitalists and professional anti-capitalists. The capitalists aren’t just paying protection money to avoid a few protesters. They are also buying ACORN’s reputation as a leftist power-to-the-people street organization to demonstrate to center-left politicians that their giant project is good for the poor.

Have you ever noticed that leftist organizations that claim to represent poor people of color don’t always follow strict affirmative action guidelines when it comes to their really good jobs? Like the Hispanic union SEIU, which is headed by Andy Stern. Or, for example, here’s a picture of ACORN’s founder Wade Rathke, who looks like if he ever went outside in the sun, he might explode into flames.

Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

While these organs are not monolithic or hierarchically organized, they somehow magically seem to always agree with each other. The Washington Post never gets into an organizational catfight with the New York Times, or Harvard with Stanford. This, of course, is because all are ticks on the same horse – Washington – and must gallop together.

The Cathedral indeed contains many shades. They are not shades of grey, however. They are shades of brown. A drop of wine in a barrel of sewage makes sewage; a drop of sewage in a barrel of wine makes sewage.

Why, exactly, are all civilized governments on earth run in the way they are? Because they are all run, more or less, by the New York Times. More precisely, they are run by civil servants, who were trained by professors, both of whose reward systems are administered by the New York Times. This is the direct path. On the indirect path, ten percent of the population reads the Times or a comparable highbrow organ; the other ninety gets its thought from more lowbrow intermediaries, who all read the Times and wish they worked there. Together, these paths form the Modern Structure, which if not indestructible is almost so.

Pretty pictures.

A treasure hunter has unearthed the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found, in a find archaeologists have said may be even more significant than the discovery of a burial ship at Sutton Hoo 70 years ago.

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The research challenges the notion that India’s notorious rigid caste system, with its priestly Brahmans and low-status ‘untouchables’, was largely manufactured by the British.

I had never heard that anybody thought the Indian caste system was created by the British. Sounds like one of those wacky notions from the hate-Western-civilization Left.

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The end of an era.

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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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And pretty perky those perks can be, too.

Dr Kealey’s piece – on “lust” – said: “Most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do? Enjoy her! She’s a perk.”

The comments were condemned last night by the National Union of Students who said they displayed an “astounding lack of respect for women”.

I don’t know which is more appalling – the professor’s omments, or the fact that Britain has a “National Union of Students”.

A bad experience with AT&T.

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

Two tin cans and a string give better service than AT&T, and cost far less.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line has a bone to pick with AARP.

My only regret about not being a “joiner” is that I don’t have many opportunities to quit organizations. I am a member of AARP, though, and this is looking like the perfect time to quit.

House Republicans have issued a report providing evidence that AARP is in a position to receive tens of millions of dollars in “kickbacks” if Democratic health care legislation becomes law.

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No, they’re not talking about the Congressional appropriations process. Being Slate, they’re talking about a medical device that poor people can’t afford unless they’re subsidized by taxpayers, so obviously this means that the system is broken. The complaint seems to be that because we have more MRIs per capita than any other country, we therefore suck. No, I don’t follow their line of thought, either.

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That explains a lot.

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A number of “youths” are on trial in Copenhagen, charged with attempting to kill a member of the Danish chapter of Hells Angels at his tattoo parlor.

When the trial began, culturally enriched friends of the accused were on hand to yell, threaten, and assault anyone who interfered with them or gave them negative coverage in the press. Needless to say, when the friends of the Hells Angels arrived, they were not at all meek and passive in the face of all that concentrated enrichment.

Friends of those on trial also threatened journalists sent to cover the trial, but a police operation prevented the situation developing.

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A steam train in south Wales is using coal transported from Siberia, rather than from its local mine three miles away, due to regulations about how the coal can be transported.

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

Read it.

So after witnessing the waves of antipathy across the country toward President Obama’s policies, New York Times writer Charles Blow introduces his readers to the term, “aversive racism.” It’s a sinister kind of prejudice, Charles explains, that reveals itself in disagreements based on factors “other than race.”

A simpler definition of aversive racism?

If you say it’s not about race, then it’s really about race.

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A new paper in The Economists’ Voice concludes that the costs of the “cash for clunkers” program exceed the benefits by approximately $2000 per vehicle.

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

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If the federal government funds art and other expressive endeavors, politicization is sure to follow.

And that’s a basic argument against the government funding anything except national defense and law enforcement.

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The problem is that we are in this awful in-between phase of our planets productivity curve. Technology has vastly reduced the number of workers and resources that are required to make what the planet needs. This means that a small number of people, the people in control of the creation of goods, get the benefit of the increased productivity. When we get to the end of this curve and everyone can, in essence, be their own manufacturer, things will be good again. But until we can ride this curve to its natural stopping point, there will be much suffering, as the jobs that technology kills are not replaced.

Say’s Law works, whether you like it or not.