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Gotta love Australians.

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We have the technology.

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The New York Times is shocked, shocked I tell you, that conservative journalists are learning all the tricks that ‘progressive’ journalists have been using for years.

‘Momeee! Johnny hit me back!’

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Well, that will certainly come in handy.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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On the Left, there’s no room for 90% compliance.

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The pastime, which has a small but passionate following in the southern and western United States, is largely self-explanatory: using gunpowder to fire an anvil up to 200 feet in the air. It is also known as anvil launching and anvil firing.

Mark Steyn looks back on his life after sounding the alarm about the current demographic meltdown in the West.

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Democratic staff for the House oversight committee informed their GOP counterparts today that the majority has changed the locks on the committee’s hearing room. While Republicans previously enjoyed their own key to the room, they will now have to request access from Democrats. This followed a bitter partisan argument in which Republicans refused to take down a video from their website that contradicted Dem explanations about a closed-door meeting on the Countrywide VIP loan scandal.

Has there every been a bigger oxymoron than the ‘Democratic’ Party?

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I guess “Nook” stands for “Not Book”.

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We have the technology.

Jerry Pournelle takes a look.

Population growth: there is now a scheme to persuade people for not having kids by giving them a carbon credit. Like all population limiting schemes, this one seems designed to breed those who pay attention to population growth arguments out of the human race.

We’re doing well at convincing some Western cultures to commit suicide, as predicted by James Burnham in Suicide of the West. Burnham was fond of saying that Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide. That was thought to be an obsolete observation after the end of the Seventy Years War; perhaps it is not so irrelevant as some thought.

The Hog isn’t doing politics any more. Nope. Not a bit.

Some dogs, you can kick every day. They’ll keep coming back and licking your hand. Others eventually bite. Obama has been kicking the press for over a year. Scratch that. He’s been having his servants kick the press, which is even more degrading. Nobody wants to be bitten by Renfield or shot by Gabby Hayes. It’s okay to be defeated by Luthor, but nobody wants to be pimp-slapped by Otis. Even the liberal press has been hammered. Will the Fox feud wake them up? When your entire profession is being threatened, sooner or later, you have to notice. If the Obamites can mistreat the biggest name in cable news, they can definitely beat on little tykes like Olbermann and David Gregory.

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After nine years in development, tens of millions of dollars in funding and a delayed product launch, Plastic Logic says it’s finally ready to debut the first electronic reader made of plastic electronics.

Emphasis added.

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KINSTON, N.C. | Voters in this small city decided overwhelmingly last year to do away with the party affiliation of candidates in local elections, but the Obama administration recently overruled the electorate and decided that equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the Democratic Party.

The Justice Department’s ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their “candidates of choice” – identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.

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And you think you’ve got problems….

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The squatters vowed to occupy dozens more, in a bid to force wealthy owners to “squat proof” their wealthy properties.

This is just a guess, but I suspect that mounting their heads on spikes in the front yard would probably do it.

But that’s my idea — what’s your idea?

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Percy the cat has become the most famous pet in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, after it was revealed that he often leaves his home on Green Howard’s Drive and travels to the Sea Life Centre by rail.

The six-year-old animal spends the day watching the fish and penguins before hopping back on to the miniature North Bay Railway train when it is time to go home.

A role model for modern Britain: A slacker cat.

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As the cognoscenti predicted, most of the stimulus money went to stimulate — more goverment.

“We didn’t see much of anything,” noted Elaine Walker, mayor of Bowling Green, a relatively prosperous town of 55,000 in the western part of the state. “The money went to the state and was siphoned off by them. We got about zero from it.”

Jeremy Wagstaff looks at phish.

I’m fully awake now, and doing some digging on who is behind the Driver Robot “driver phish.” The digging has introduced me to a whole level to the software scam industry.

I’m glad somebody had the time and energy to dig into this sort of thing. The most serious aspect is that Google appears to be in pari delicto here.

It seems that either Trentin, Tim and Susan are just really generous with their comments and share software tips on a regular basis, or this software schmoozefest is linked to Swishsoft the company that sells Swift Optimizer, software that compresses Flash files. All three put glowing reviews on the software website, althought it seems Susan has moved from the U.S. to Australia in the meantime. Must be the taxes.

And no, I couldn’t find any reference to Trentin Lagrange apart from glowing software testimonials. Either the guy just lives to write software reviews or he is not really living.

Dymphna, at Gates of Vienna, has some worthwhile observations.

First of all, my larger contention: that the national Republican Party has so completely lost its integrity, vigor, and moral sensibility that it is in grave danger of losing the confidence of all the American people.

I have refused the Republican denomination for quite some time, as have many people I know. When asked, we usually reply that we’re “conservative” or “libertarian”. Though those labels aren’t a good fit, they are at least not a shameful one.

And that pretty well sums up my position, too.

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“Once reunited with Rome, they may keep most of the Liturgical celebrations according to their tradition, which is closer to the Tridentine Mass,” La Stampa explained, adding that they would also “keep their married clergy but not married bishops.”

Progress, of a sort. ‘Guys! Don’t stop there! Come back – come all the way back….’

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See, it’s good to be “King,” but what do you do when you’re at Trudy’s “North Star” Tex-Mex Restaurant tucking into a chile relleno (with salsa verde, black beans, and the ground beef filling), and the guy across the table looks you in the eye and offers you enough money that you never have to work again?

Winning the lottery presents one with a similar choice, and the choice that one makes says a lot about one’s character. How many of us have just sat back and pondered for half an hour or so what we would do with sudded access to ‘life-changing’ amounts of money? Try it sometime. ‘I have a check for $10 million in my hand. What do I do with it?’ Step by step. I think you’ll be surprised.

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For decades, neuroscientists have theorized that the brain “time stamps” events as they happen, allowing us to keep track of where we are in time and when past events occurred. However, they couldn’t find any evidence that such time stamps really existed — until now.

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If she weren’t extinct, that is. Of course, so could a chimpanzee — if he cared.

According to Peter McAllister, in Manthropology: the Science of Inadequate Modern Man, so completely wussy have we become that were Usain “Lightning” Bolt to go head-to-head with an ancient Australian aboriginal, it’d be silver medal position for the Jamaican sprinter.

Hey, these books don’t sell themselves.

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Today’s least fashionable ‘victimless crime’.

Woebegone British swingbellies have launched a campaign against anti-lardo “hate crime” and discrimination, even as a survey of possibly gutbusting Germans has revealed that being “overweight” is actually not a health hazard.

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Scientists using a network of ground sensors emplaced in Antarctica say that NASA satellites have overestimated the amount of ice that is melting and running off into the ocean from the polar continent.

Funny how that works.

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That sounds about right.

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What’s it all mean, Mr Natural?

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Or it may be a McDonald’s Instant Win puzzle piece. Be the first on your block to win a chance to bitch-slap Tom Hanks.

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I am not making this up.

Republican Senator Takes Heat for Cooperating on Cap-and-Trade.

Well, it’s Lindsey Graham, so it’s not like it’s a real Republican Senator, but the video is still pretty amusing.

The video above is difficult to hear at times, but the lead question touched off loud applause: “Why do you think it’s necessary to get in bed with people like John Kerry?”

A very good question.

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Among the media, academia and within planning circles, there’s a generally standing answer to the question of what cities are the best, the most progressive and best role models for small and mid-sized cities. The standard list includes Portland, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, and Denver. In particular, Portland is held up as a paradigm, with its urban growth boundary, extensive transit system, excellent cycling culture, and a pro-density policy. These cities are frequently contrasted with those of the Rust Belt and South, which are found wanting, often even by locals, as “cool” urban places.

But look closely at these exemplars and a curious fact emerges. If you take away the dominant Tier One cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles you will find that the “progressive” cities aren’t red or blue, but another color entirely: white.

In fact, not one of these “progressive” cities even reaches the national average for African American percentage population in its core county. Perhaps not progressiveness but whiteness is the defining characteristic of the group.

As the college educated flock to these progressive El Dorados, many factors are cited as reasons: transit systems, density, bike lanes, walkable communities, robust art and cultural scenes. But another way to look at it is simply as White Flight writ large. Why move to the suburbs of your stodgy Midwest city to escape African Americans and get criticized for it when you can move to Portland and actually be praised as progressive, urban and hip?

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Human rights advocates are unhappy with the Obama administration’s foreign policy, citing three developments: (1) the failure to back the Goldstone Report; (2) the failure to pressure Sri Lanka to improve its treatment of Tamils; and (3) the willingness to deal with Sudan’s President Bashir, who was recently indicted by the International Criminal Court.  It turns out that Sudan is a useful ally in fighting terrorism and Sri Lanka is, well, complicated, and Israel is Israel.  As Julian Ku notes, coddling Bashir is hardly a way to support the ICC, which is already reeling from the decision of members of the African Union not to extradite him to The Hague if he enters their countries, in violation of their legal obligations (most of them belong to the ICC; a few have since backpedaled).  Meanwhile, the Obama administration has apparently succeeded in pressuring Spain to water down its universal jurisdiction statute, the one that the Spaniards were supposed to use to prosecute Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and David Addington.  Well, good for the Obama administration: it has implicitly repudiated campaign rhetoric that endorsed global legalism, and it didn’t take it as long as one might have thought.

Read it. And watch the videos.

Under the core tenets of multiculturalism, all evils in the world are assigned to white Europeans. The trade in African slaves is represented as one of the foremost examples of white evil, and virtually the entire historical focus is on the Middle Passage from West Africa to the New World, in which white men play the part of primary villains.

What is generally ignored is an inconvenient truth: most black African slaves were in fact captured by Muslims and carried off to North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula to serve Muslim masters under the most brutal conditions imaginable.

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“I was a fervent anti-capitalist at the time, but I came to realise during my four years in Benin that government and NGOs were having little or no impact. It was businesses that were really changing lives “delivering technologies like mobile phones, computers and the internet”.

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An excellent summary of how the government helped cause the financial crisis, and how what they plan to do about it will make things worse, not better.

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The golf-cart boom has followed an IRS ruling that golf carts qualify for the electric-car credit as long as they are also road worthy. These qualifying golf carts are essentially the same as normal golf carts save for adding some safety features, such as side and rearview mirrors and three-point seat belts. They typically can go 15 to 25 miles per hour.

The problem with government programs is that the people who make a living gaming the system are smarter — and always will be — than the people who set up the government programs. Entrepreneurs are always a step ahead of bureaucrats, just by the nature of the personality types involved. This is why having the government run something leads inevitably to waste/fraud/abuse, and always will. You would think that people would eventually catch on to this, but apparently they never do.

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Meanwhile, in Moscow, while Secretary of State Clinton was getting a rather brusque treatment, reports appeared that Russia was endorsing not just preemptive use of military force – but even preemptive use of nuclear weapons, and that even in local or regional wars.

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George Will understands the dialectic.

As Harvard’s president, Larry Summers, economist and former Treasury secretary, was a lion in a den of Daniels. The faculty Daniels, their tender feelings hurt by his occasional testiness, cowered together and declared him a meanie. Facing a faculty vote of no confidence, he resigned.

Now he is Barack Obama’s principal economic adviser. So, weary of John Boehner, leader of House Republicans, dwelling on rising unemployment, Summers sent him a letter. In it he said, as Obama and his minions so consistently do, something that may be the text of this year’s White House Christmas card: At least we are not George Bush, so there.

But one-quarter of Stimulus II will be spent this year. Another quarter will be spent in 2011. Half will be spent in 2010, an election year. Which suggests that Stimulus II is, and Stimulus III would be, primarily designed to save a few dozen jobs — those of Democratic members of the House and Senate.

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There is an obvious alternative. We could pay for our medical treatment the same way that we pay for our cars or our food or a roof over our heads: out of our own pockets. Before rejecting the idea out of hand, at least acknowledge that it would encourage us to ask a very different set of questions, including: “is there a cheaper way that would work?”, “can I get better value treatment elsewhere?”, and even “would I save money if I drank less and exercised more?” The effect on cost and quality would be bracing.

We do pay for healthcare. If you have an individual plan, you can see the rapid inflation before your very eyes. If you don’t, your employer provided plan has probably decreased in quality, and there is an argument that the cost of the plan to the employer is one main reason for wage stagnation (in other words, the cost of the employee included healthcare). There are issues with assuming that purchasing healthcare is analogous to purchasing food. But it is true that people do not as individuals (the doctor and the patient) make decisions which minimize costs because there are no incentives to do so.

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If we want to know what Islam has in mind for us, look at the history of India.

As is well-known, in the East, India has suffered from attacks, occupation and colonization by Islam since the 8th century (resulting in the enslavement of many millions, massacres and ethnic cleansing, destruction of some fifteen thousand temples, etc). This millennium-long enslavement and colonization, however, resulted in only 12% of the Hindus converting to Islam. In addition, for half a century India has suffered not only from terrorist attacks and proxy war by Muslims (supported and directed by Pakistan) but also from appeasement politics and the Islamist-Socialist coalition.

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Mario Cuomo and Blue Cross destroyed the individual insurance market in the state. Now Congress wants to impose the same rules on 50 states.

Today, New York’s private individual insurance market is among the nation’s most expensive and highly regulated. New York City residents buying private, unsubsidized individual insurance coverage pay at least $9,036 a year for individual coverage and $26,460 for family coverage. New York’s average premiums in the individual market are more than twice the national average, according to a 2007 eHealth Insurance survey.

Today, 14% of New York’s population lacks coverage, essentially the same as the national average of 15%. Partly because of the high costs of private coverage, nearly one in four New Yorkers is enrolled in Medicaid. New York’s Medicaid program is the nation’s most expensive, requiring high local and state taxes to support it.

Pandora unboxed.

The Pandora “music genome” project is one of the most intellectually exciting efforts (IMHO) going today.

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Just waiting for the Democrats to add this to their ‘health reform’ plan. (Hey, it’s European, right? We want a health care plan like Britain’s, right?)

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This is pretty neat.