Read it.

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.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Republicans had their Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska, and now Democrats seem intent on wrapping themselves firmly around Congressman Jack Murtha’s Airport for No One in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. So much for changing the culture of spending in Washington.

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While Sikhs, Hindus, and Christians were slowly driven out of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province by Muslim militants, the Kalash were free to drink their own distilled spirits and smoke cannabis.

But the militant maulanas of the Taliban have finally caught up with them and declared war on their culture and heritage by kidnapping their most devoted supporter.

Taliban commanders have taken Professor Athanasion Larounis, a Greek aid worker who has generated £2.5 million in donations to build schools, clinics, clean water projects and a museum.

They are now demanding £1.25 million and the release of three militant leaders in exchange for his safe return.

The only difference I can see between Islam and the Mafia is that Muslims don’t eat a lot of pasta.

And why not? Muhammad himself was a robber and mass murderer — and their ideal man.

Read it.

Good thing that Khalid Sheik Muhammad isn’t a scientist.

The Other McCain has an analysis.

Alas, Bush had a knack for surrounding himself with mediocre minds, to which category Matt Latimer clearly belongs (along with David Kuo and Michael Gerson).

An analysis with which I substantially agree.

So it can be said that Bush the son sought to redeem the family name by reversing what were widely considered two of Bush the father’s biggest errors. (Critics of the Middle East policies

Nevertheless, Bush 43 had that same New England WASP Republican commitment to “respectability” — the Politics of Niceness — which was the intrinsic flaw of his father’s politics, and which is why New England WASP Republicans are a dying breed.

And rightly so.

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There was a time when nightly “carbecues” were restricted mainly to France, especially the banlieues of Paris. Every morning one could gauge the current level of immigrant rage by news reports giving the number of cars burned by “youths” the previous night.

But nowadays France is not alone. In recent months immigrant suburbs in various parts of Sweden — Malmö, Uppsala, Gothenburg, and now Tensta — have been illuminated at night by scores of burning cars, tires, dumpsters, and buildings. In these areas firefighting has become a dangerous occupation, as “youths” set fires and then ambush emergency workers when they arrive to put them out.

Read it.

This is from 2004, but I’m going to put it here, because I wasn’t aware of it, and since I try to be aware of stuff involving my favorite authors, I assume that others might not be aware of it, either — and Neal Stephenson is someone of whom you ought to be aware. He is, as we say, always worth reading.

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Yet another reason to stay away from Facebook and other narcissism enablers.

The small-scale survey indicates that people who believe they have discreet online habits may still be making personal information about themselves public.

No shit.

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Well, I can certainly understand their position; I wouldn’t want my kids exposed to U.N. textbooks, either.

Read it.

Meanwhile, we taxpayers in Massachusetts are stuck with the bill for housing Obama’s Aunt Zeituni. The Wikipedia entry on this illegal immigrant has a good explanation of how she has avoided deportation thanks to the U.S. court system taking years to process even the simplest cases, e.g., Should a woman who has already twice been ordered deported, but did not leave, be… deported? (Put some judges and lawyers like that into a tire factory and pretty soon you need tariff walls to protect them against the Chinese.)

Massachusetts taxpayers have been paying for Aunt Zeituni’s housing for six years. Ever since Barack Obama’s ascendancy to the White House, we’ve also been paying for extra police details to deter the curious and the press. The Obama family inflicted further cost and inconvenience on folks in this state during their family vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, when roads and airspace were shut down for up to a week.

What could Barack Obama do to help Massachusetts? He owns a 14-room, 6500 square foot house in Chicago (using fossil fuels to heat 6500 square feet for a family of four in one of the coldest parts of the U.S. is apparently a demonstration of one’s commitment to reversing global warming) that presumably sits vacant nearly all year. The house is guarded 24/7 by Secret Service agents. The street is closed to non-residents. Why can’t Aunt Zeituni live there? She wouldn’t be bothered by the rabble or the press. She wouldn’t be a drain on Massachusetts citizens.

Read it.

Walk-in medical clinics run by CVS, Wal-Mart and other retailers provide care for routine illnesses that is as good as, and costs less than, similar care offered in doctors’ offices, hospital emergency rooms and urgent care centers, according to a new Rand Corp. study. The cost savings over emergency rooms, in particular, was quite dramatic.

Well, that’s capitalism for you.

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It can if enough leftoids start hating it.

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Eating raw food is time-consuming and, in calorific terms, unrewarding. Some things, such as meat or tubers, require exhausting levels of mastication (chimps spend up to five hours a day gathering and chewing their food), and much of it is indigestible anyway, passing straight through the system. Cooking these ingredients breaks down the molecular structures, releasing the calories and making them easier to get through.

Well, I’ve always wondered about that.

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Actually, a generation of economic stagnation has taught the Swedes a lesson. They’ve learned that government does not produce wealth, and if they want more people to work, jobs have to pay better, after taxes. Sweden is therefore in the midst of a series of tax cuts aimed at preserving the long-term viability of its economy. Today’s headline: “Sweden slashes income tax further to boost jobs.”

Steve Sailer understands The Dialectic.

Say that you are Vice President of Predatory Securitizing at an Orange County lender and you’ve come up with a great idea: you want to give subprime liar loans with exploding teaser interest rates to illegal immigrants, then bundle them up (“secretizing”) and sell these mortgage-backed securities to naive foreigners.

But, you don’t want regulators getting sniffy about your new strategy and accusing you of Predatory Lending. So, you find a leftwing community organizing group to conduct pseudo-negotiations with. They start out denouncing you for predatory lending but end up signing a deal with you that says that in the name of fighting the financial industry’s despicable and tragic history of racist redlining, you pledge to lend billions to Hispanic undocumented workers. (In return, you cut the lefties in for a little piece of the action, but you don’t have to give them much because they have so many competitors — the National Community Redevelopment Alliance lists 600 member organizations.) Then you wave that agreement in front of the noses of any regulators who start asking questions: “Look, capitalists and leftists have come together to fight racism and nativism! What, are you, some kind of nativist racist?”

Bryan Caplan has an interesting thought.

Are you white? Then Yes.

Are you (arguably) not-white? Then take this simple test.

Read it.

Economically, the print media are in the business of marking up paper. We can all imagine an old-style editor getting a scoop and saying “this will sell a lot of papers!” Cross out that final S and you’re describing their business model. The reason they make less money now is that people don’t need as much paper.

Steve Sailer just loves to ask the questions nobody else dares to ask — or answer.

This happens every single day right now: an illegal immigrant roofer falls off a roof and is hurt. He doesn’t have health insurance. Is he denied health care?

Of course not. America is a civilized country and we won’t let suffering people within our borders go untreated. So, an ambulance rushes him to a hospital emergency room and he spends as many nights in the hospital as it takes to treat him. He pays nothing because he has no money. The roofing contractor doesn’t pay either (his motto: privatize profits, socialize costs). The illegal alien’s cost is simply added to the bills paid by people with insurance.

No, the big issues about illegal aliens, health care, and amnesty revolve around the indirect effects on the birthrate that nobody is supposed to think about in modern America.

If the roofer eventually goes home to Latin America because there is no construction work anymore in America without fathering any children in the U.S., then the costs he imposes on us are finite. If, however, he fathers a number of anchor babies within the U.S., then the costs become long term and difficult to fully foresee.

Read it.

Here and there across America, good news does happen. Take Oklahoma, where the looming prospect of legal reform is causing a run on lawsuits.

Get the T-shirt.

The Obama administration seems to be bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase “nanny state.”

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More fun from the Left Coast.

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At times I think ATR needs to set up a seperate website just to keep track of all the articles proving without doubt how President Obama’s so-called “stimulus” plan totally, utterly, and abysmally failed.

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

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Oh, ya think?

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A most interesting slideshow. Inaccurate as ‘the most corrupt’, of course, because they have an equal number of Republicans and Democrats; but a good effort.

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This is an oddly-written piece.

Shay Hable, an attorney in the Atlanta office of Bryan Cave, said she has been telling corporate clients to remind employees they shouldn’t give laid-off colleagues a plug in these online venues, because it might come back to haunt the company.

Yeah, well, I see how that’s a problem for the company — but how is that a problem for me? How does this “online compliment” threaten me, at all — unless the implication is that the company can retaliate in some way?

Ms. Hable said that bad recommendations are the ones that generally draw libel lawsuits, but even good ones can cause trouble. “Every day there’s a lawsuit for something, and the lawyer on the other side is looking at Facebook and LinkedIn.” She said that if someone has been dismissed because of poor performance, and a manager has given her a positive recommendation, “the story looks like it’s shifty, and they say ‘I caught you in a lie.’”

Well, maybe it is shifty. Maybe you did catch them in a lie. What about that?

Ms. Hable said she hasn’t been able to find any cases where a good LinkedIn recommendation has caused trouble, but she thinks the potential is there.

That’s because she’s a lawyer, and lawyers are paid to borrow trouble. This is like having a dairy farmer tell you ‘you never outgrow your need for milk’.

Read it.

Oh, I mean, really — who bothers with that sort of thing any more? Yes we can!

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Let’s say you’re preparing dinner and you realize with dismay that you don’t have any certified organic Tuscan kale. What to do?

Here’s how Michelle Obama handled this very predicament Thursday afternoon:

The Secret Service and the D.C. police brought in three dozen vehicles and shut down H Street, Vermont Avenue, two lanes of I Street and an entrance to the McPherson Square Metro station. They swept the area, in front of the Department of Veterans Affairs, with bomb-sniffing dogs and installed magnetometers in the middle of the street, put up barricades to keep pedestrians out, and took positions with binoculars atop trucks. Though the produce stand was only a block or so from the White House, the first lady hopped into her armored limousine and pulled into the market amid the wail of sirens.

I can’t believe that they actually published this in the Washington Post. Somebody obviously didn’t get the memo that the Obamas Can Do No Wrong.

Read it.

We have the technology.

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I wouldn’t want to be the guy to tell then no….

Jeff Jarvis recently had surgery for prostate cancer. Apparently this involved a robot surgeon.

At 9a Monday, I walked into the bright operating room at Sloan Kettering and faced the robot. Pictures of it on the manufacturer’s web site make it look small, like something that might screw in radio knobs on a Cooper Mini: friendly. In person, the robot is huge, like something Sigourney Weaver would defeat in space: imposing. I saluted it and backed away.

We have the technology.

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I am not making this up.

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What is it about politicians that makes them think taxes are voluntary, or makes them want to portray them as such to the public?

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I reported last night on one of the “Swedish” terrorists captured in Pakistan who turned out to be the daughter of the President of the Swedish Muslim Council.

Read it.

And about time, too.

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Thomas Frank’s weekly “Tilting Yard” column in the Wall Street Journal is said to present the most persuasive arguments the liberal opposition can make to the Wall Street Journal’s generally conservative/libertarian editorial views. Alas, the arguments are often shallow, and there is no historical perspective at all. I show you as an example, today’s essay “The Left Should Reclaim ‘Freedom‘”.

That’s not the only problem with Thomas Frank’s essay. He has accepted without debate the Progressive notion of freedom. The traditional American view of freedom is that one will be left alone to do what one wants to do even if everyone else disapproves. (If that disapproval is because what you want to do restricts someone else’s freedom then there is something to discuss: e.g. your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose.) If you want to slaughter and cook a goat in your front yard, I have to show that this does me some real harm before I can forbid you to do it. John Adams summed this up when he said that we in America believe that each man is the best judge of his own interest. The fact that you can show that some habits — smoking cigarettes, riding a motorcycle without a helmet, eating too much and becoming obese, swearing oaths to Odin and Thor, putting out bowls of milk for the night elves, denouncing my neighbor as a witch (but not building a bonfire to throw the neighbor in), not buying health insurance,  not wearing socks, getting drunk in my own house and staying there, taking the Name of God in vain, myriads of consenting sexual practices, buying gold, buying stocks, giving my money to Bernie Madoff to invest, using Ubuntu rather than Windows, Firefox rather than Internet Explorer — well, you get the idea — may be bad for the user, and you know this, doesn’t give you an automatic right to prevent me from doing them. (And of course many including me might dispute the harm from the choice made.)

Read it.

Execution? Is that allowed any more?

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

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It’s remarkable how much alike all these honor-killing reports sound. Across the length and breadth of Europe, from Slagelse to Grizza, whether in English, Italian, French, Swedish, Dutch, Danish, or German, the story is the same.

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Never get between a German and his baked beans….

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But that trick never works….

Otto would make a great Emperor, though.

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Not sure I buy this — how are you going to grill it?

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

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It’s getting so that even Brits are noticing that Jimmuh is a moron.

George Bush was reviled in the most blood-curdling terms by large sections of the American population: did anyone ever claim that this was because he was a Texan? The Ali G question, “Is it because I is black?” has a pretty straightforward answer in this case: no. Americans have profound fears about central government taking power away from individual citizens and those fears are legitimised by the Constitution. They have every right to express them without being smeared as “racists”.

Read it.

Let’s see – no Arabs on Facebook. Sounds like a win to me.

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Remembering that would have saved a lot of trouble over the years.

It starts with the eternal battle over language. It is written in the sacred scriptures of the EU that English and French have equal status as working languages, and all French diplomats are under instructions to conduct business in French when it is their turn to chair anything. This of course triggers passive resistance; our diplomats are all supposed to speak French, though some don’t and others conceal it, and the French are doing well if they can get 10 minutes into the meeting without everyone lapsing into English. The arrival in 1995 of various Scandiwegians sealed victory for Britain, as most of them couldn’t manage so much as a parley-voo, and no doubt the struggle is now utterly hopeless.