Read it.

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

It has been a half-century since have we seen a presidential inner circle so identified with our densest urban centers. The three most recent Democratic presidents — Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — all had substantial roots in small-town America that also helped them understand the aspirations of middle-class suburban and exurban voters.

In contrast, this is an administration steeped in the mystique of big cities. Chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is a tough-guy player from the variously effective and consistently corrupt Chicago city machine. The members of the Cabinet and top-tier apparatus are longtime residents of such large cities as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston and, of course, Chicago.

Yet for the most part, the big media have been too captivated by the president’s urbane mystique to delve too deeply into the Chicago morass. Largely denizens of big cities, the top media generally embrace the notion that dense urban places are inherently better, more efficient, culturally and environmentally sound than less glamorous, more spread-out places.

You can see this worldview almost daily in The New York Times or, more substantially, in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly and The New Republic, where writers often like to envision an American future bright for top-tier cities and pretty bleak for everyone else.

Joel Spolsky is always worth reading.

Lacking a program manager, your garden-variety super-smart programmer is going to come up with a completely baffling user interface that makes perfect sense IF YOU’RE A VULCAN (cf. git). The best programmers are notoriously brilliant, and have some trouble imagining what it must be like not to be able to memorize 16 one-letter command line arguments. These programmers then have a tendency to get attached to their first ideas, especially when they’ve already written the code.

Read it.

The term ‘vegilante’ almost redeems with its cleverness the degenerative effect that it and similar locutions have on our culture. It is by such small and pleasant steps that we descend further and further into the Pit, until at last we grasp that we have laid up for ourselves, chip by chip, a future of discontent and shallow vacuity.

Read it.

These are, indeed, the Last Times.

The Other McCain can always be counted on for pithy expression.

Welcome to the Obama Nation, where all criticism is subject to the accusation of raaaaacism. If Obama throws Jones under the bus, the Leader’s minions will depict it as a sop to right-wing hatemongers, and Jones will walk away with a platinum Victimhood Card, immediately redeemable for a six-figure book contract.

Read it.

Read it.

Gotta watch out for that sort of thing.

Read it.

And this is, of course, an Important Subject, worthy of our attention.

Read it.

At a town-hall meeting in Portsmouth, N.H., last month, our uninformed lawyer in chief suggested that we physicians would rather chop off a foot than manage diabetes since we would make more money doing surgery. Then President Obama compounded his attack by claiming a doctor’s reimbursement is between “$30,000” and “$50,000” for such amputations! (Actually, such surgery costs only about $1,500.)

Physicians have never been so insulted. Because of these affronts, I will gladly volunteer for the important duty of controlling and regulating lawyers. Since most of what lawyers do is repetitive boilerplate or pushing paper, physicians would have no problem dictating what is appropriate for attorneys. We physicians know much more about legal practice than lawyers do about medicine.

This is pretty funny.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

The airport has an $8.5 million, taxpayer-funded radar system that has never been used. The runway was paved with reinforced concrete at a cost of more than $17 million. The latest investment was $800,000 from the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to repave half of the secondary runway. (Never mind that the first one is hardly ever in use.)

Congressman John Murtha, the gift that keeps on spending.

Read it.

Allotment holders in Southampton have been told by their council that barbed wire will not be put up to protect their crime-plagued plots in case vandals hurt themselves.

Uh, I sort of thought that was the point?

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Oh, I’m sorry, it already is, along our sourthern border. Forget I even mentioned it.

Read it.

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

Steve Sailer is always — let me repeat that: ALWAYS — worth reading.

From this perspective, the 1960s cultural revolution look like an Elites Liberation movement, in which Unitarians, Congregationalists, Jews, Episcopalians, Christian Scientists, and similar products of centuries of bourgeois culture decided that they, personally, could get by without the old rules, which, indeed, many of them could. Moreover, they were tired of being expected to be role models of starchy behavior for the proles.

But the tenor of the times demanded that this Elites Lib movement be cloaked in egalitarian and civil rights rhetoric and policies (such as refocusing AFDC from Roosevelt’s aim of supporting widows to supporting single mothers, because we wouldn’t want to discriminate against blacks), with disastrous effects on people toward the bottom of society, especially blacks.

Read it.

Col Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya proposed a UN motion calling for the abolition of Switzerland after a dispute over the arrest of one of the president’s sons, it has emerged.

You really can’t make this stuff up.

Read it.

I am saddened to see no Democrats on this list. Well. Perhaps the Internet is not the panacea that I had hoped it would be.

Read it.

Ted Kennedy’s death sort of shook up the list, I don’t doubt.

Megan McArdle is on the case.

It seems clear to me that switching freight to rail whenever possible should be a policy priority, but it’s the red-headed stepchild of the environmental movement.  We need freight cars that look more like pandas.

Mencius Moldbug continues the seminar.

For example, your old decision structure might be: the Constitution of the United States of America, under the laws of Congress and the several states, as executed by the President and judged by the Supreme Court, answering through free and fair democratic elections to the self-governing American people. Your new decision structure might be: Chuck Norris.

Read it.

Considering the sort of culture and government under which Spanish-speaking peoples tend to suffer, I find it entirely understandable that they might think themselves afflicted with blood-sucking malevolent spirits. But that’s me.

Read it.

The great buildings of universities and cities alike are sermons in stone.  They aim to teach us something about the the fundamental commitments of an institution or a city or polity as much as what might take place inside those buildings.  And in the honor we bestow through the names we associate with such monuments, a society teaches something of significance to successive generations.   I would be the first to praise the generosity to a benefactor, and to encourage people of means to support a worthy cause – and it is meet to show gratitude in a fitting form.  Today, however, an older ethic of according honor  for lifetime service and sacrifice – or, more homely still, testimony to the geography of local places (e.g., Three River Stadium, now PNC Park) –  is increasingly crowded out in a race to leverage naming rights to the highest bidder.  What lesson are we teaching to our young through such sermons in stone?

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I’m impressed.

Read it.

Note the implicit distinction between “Germany” and the German government. That’s what it feels like to be a European. That’s why our political establishment wants to be “more European”.

Read it.

Val Kilmer could not be reached for comment.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

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

Daniel Pipes has coined a new and useful term: “persons of cover”.

Suitable for framing.

Michael Pollan talk about food. A fascinating guy, for a communist.

But here’s what I don’t get: How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

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

Read it.

And give up any thought of ever holding a security clearance or running for public office in a Red State.

It does, however, fit on your resume if you want to be a teacher, community organizer, or Rainbow Coalition race pimp.

There is balance in all things.

Read it.

China currently accounts for 93 percent of production of so-called rare earth elements — and more than 99 percent of the output for two of these elements, dysprosium and terbium, vital for a wide range of green energy technologies and military applications like missiles.

Perhaps we ought to ask the Chinese what it’s like to have a government with a foreign policy based on the country’s own interests.

Read it.

The tolerant outlook of an Arab with the democratic impulses of an African – a winning combination.

The Other McCain is having fun.

By the way, this is probably a good time to express my appreciation to those readers — including generous folks in Albuquerque, N.M., Jacksonville, Fla., Depauville, N.Y., and Tequesta, Fla. — who have recently done their share to help me push the frontiers of rhetorical brutality against idiot liberals and RINO sellouts.

Bryan Caplan is not afraid to ask the Politically Incorrect question.

Textbook accounts of monopoly usually take the existence of a monopoly for granted, then analyze its consequences.  When I was an undergraduate, this usually provoked me to argue with the textbook.  “Where did this ‘monopoly power’ come from?!” I’d ask.  My inner rant then continued: “If the firm has a monopoly because the government made competition illegal, the solution isn’t antitrust; it’s legalizing competition.  If the firm has a monopoly because it’s the best, the solution isn’t antitrust; it’s a little freakin’ appreciation.”

Read it.

Let’s see, that would be the Fifth Column…. Looks as if Muslims have leaned a lot from Communism over the years.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Hey, whatever works. (Actually, they were wondering how this dork ever came to be considered funny, but he obviously doesn’t speak gorilla.)

Read it.

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

Read it.

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

Read it.

I seem to remember hearing once that George Washington advised not getting involved in the fights of Europe….

The Other McCain is having fun.

One post is never enough, is it? When you take up the habit of bashing David Brooks, it’s like crack cocaine. One hit and you’re hooked.

Would that other conservative writers would catch the habit regarding the MediaPetCons like Brooks and Gerson.

Brooks speaks for the testosterone-deficient, the effete, those who are by habit critics because they lack the capacity to actually do anything. To borrow Patton’s description of such creatures, they know even less about fighting than they know about fornication, which is nothing at all.

Yeah, that’s about right.

Dvorak has a dream.

Having heard Bill Gates promote the tablet machines to no avail, and watched the birth of the Kindle, Steve Jobs has developed a clear vision of what a perfect tablet should be, I’m sure. And no matter what it will cost to build, Apple’s offering will go beyond what anyone expected, just so Steve can show up all those who tried before.

Speed the day.

Read it.

As the Labor Department’s Web site notes, the original intent for the holiday was a parade that would illustrate “the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations.” Over the years, however, Labor Day has morphed into little more than a three-day weekend signaling the end of summer.

So essentially it’s a semi-socialist pro-organized-labor holiday.