Read it.

If it works.

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A Tim Allen special. Arh, Arh, Arh.

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A new Rasmussen Reports poll shows that if he were running for re-election today, Mr. Nelson would lose to Nebraska’s GOP Governor David Heineman by a stunning 61% to 30%. Only three years ago, Mr. Nelson won his current term with a solid 64% of the vote.

Some good news, for a change.

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A decade ago, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, two grandees of American journalism, warned of a crisis: The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal had revealed a news media publishing at “warp speed,” discarding probity for prurience and embracing a non-stop news cycle of aggression, allegation and assertion where once facts were checked and sources confirmed before ministering scandal to the public. Much like a beleaguered Scotty on a hurtling Starship Enterprise, Kovach and Rosenstiel warned that democracy “cannot take it.”

Well, they need to get rid of the political filters first.

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A US court has turned back an appeal of a 2008 ruling that declared that if you blow out your ears by listening to your iPod too loudly, it’s your own damn fault.

Common sense breaks out in the American legal system! Who saw that coming?

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Too bad it didn’t happen to Tolkien before he died.

Of course.

Heather had two mommies, and they’re both bitches.

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A devout Rockland County couple is suing the New York Archdiocese for barring their daughter from attending a Catholic preschool because she hasn’t been fully vaccinated.

The couple, who filed the suit anonymously, charges they’re being subjected to religious discrimination and are seeking a court order allowing their 4-year-old to attend the St. Margaret School in Pearl River after the archdiocese turned down their request for a religious exemption.

I was under the impression that ‘religious discrimination’ was sort of the whole point behind having Catholic schools. Shows how much I know.

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The school has to pay, of course.

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Why do so many terrorists have engineering degrees?

Engineers like to blow things up?

Christopher Hitchens is always worth reading.

Read it.

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

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Urban Democrats are flooding rural districts to steal elections.

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Ilir Kumbaro, a former east European spy master, is alleged to have kidnapped and tortured three men in his Albanian homeland. But after falling out with officials there, he fled to Britain in 1996.

He allegedly used the alias Shaqa Shatri to claim asylum and moved to a council estate in Fulham, London.

He is understood to be claiming thousands of pounds in jobseeker’s allowance and housing benefits, having never worked during his 13-year life in Britain.

And why not? His side won, after all.

Read it.

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It’s as I always say: Rodents get all the good stuff.

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Some cruel, mysterious force or deity prevents me from hearing the name of anyone I’m introduced to, admits Michael Deacon.

And I know exactly what he means.

Read it.

Well, okay for Canada, but the American electoral system already does that very elegantly.

Oh, Lordy. Probably not safe for work.

Read it.

But, again, since this is the Kindle we’re talking about, shouldn’t Amazon make the distinction between purchased and rented? When someone buys a physical book from Amazon, they then own that book and can do pretty much what they want with it, including reselling it or giving it away. When they “purchase” an ebook from Amazon, that’s not the case at all. They’re quite limited in what they can do with it. They can’t resell it. They can’t share it with a friend (unless they give up their entire Kindle and all the books on it). And, of course, Amazon can make the ebook disappear at will — though, it insists it will never do this again. Even though it can. So, congrats to Amazon, for renting more books on a day when such rentals are to be expected and when physical book sales are probably at their very lowest.

Perhaps ‘leased’ would be the most correct term.

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If you want to know if a ship is going to sink, watch what the richest passengers do.

If you want to know whether a culture is degenerating, watch for those who cannot distinguish between ‘if’ and ‘whether’. But read the piece anyway.

Read it.

First, as I pointed out in this post, many of the TSA’s most intrusive and annoying policies are not used by Israeli airport security, generally considered to be the best in the world; these include forcing people to take off their shoes and confiscating all liquids other than those in special containers. Interestingly, the measures used by the TSA, but not by the Israelis, tend to be highly visible and intrusive to the average traveler. That leads me to suspect that the TSA has adopted them for “security theater” reasons, so as to make it seem that they are making a great effort to combat terrorism, and make people feel more secure. If the public sees the TSA making a major visible effort, fear will perhaps decrease and the agency is less likely to be blamed for any security failures that may occur in the future. Thus, the agency engages in “political theater” measures despite the inevitable grumbling by passengers. The Israeli public, by contrast, may demand less in the way of security theater than American voters, because of the nation’s vastly greater experience in dealing with terrorist attacks.

Read it.

Everything good is bad for you.

Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

Teh Internets are a big place, though, surely with room for a good liberal racist. Naturally, LB’s goal is to convince liberals to be racist rather than racists to be liberal, and he is not always good about replying when served. But he can take off the gloves and hit a little. I charge him with contempt for history; he suggests that I should be burned as a witch. We could both be right.

Read it.

Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer, identified what he called the “three laws of prediction,” reflecting an optimistic view of ingenuity: 1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong; 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture past them into the impossible; and 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

He has some good ones.

David Friedman points out that markets will show up even when they aren’t invited, that you can learn a lot about life from role-playing games even when you’re not trying to, and that much of what people ‘know’ about economics is nonsense based on silly word games.

Read it.

Islam has been at war with the Western world for fourteen centuries — since its inception. Muslims all over the world still consider themselves to be at war with non-Muslims; this is why Islam refers to us as Dar al-Harb, the “House of War”.

The West, however, has forgotten that this war exists. We continue to labor under the illusion that Islam is an ordinary religion, like Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism.

Unfortunately, Islam is above all a totalitarian political ideology, sugar-coated with the trappings of a primitive desert religion to help veil its true nature. The publicly stated goal of Islamic theology and political ideology is to impose the rule of Islam over the entire world, and make it part of Dar al-Islam, the “House of Submission”.

Widely accepted Islamic theology based in Koranic doctrine explicitly requires that Islam be spread by any and all means necessary, including by violence and mass slaughter, in a process known as jihad, or holy war.

The fact that many Muslims do not support or engage in violent jihad is not germane. If only one percent of Muslim believers take the Islamic mandate of jihad seriously, it means there are over fifteen million people scattered among the world’s Muslims who want to destroy us, and we have no means of determining in advance which ones they are.

Therefore, those who oppose Islamic totalitarian ideology and the expansion of Islam into the West have formed themselves into a coalition known as the Counterjihad.

Read it.

An analysis of the Ft Hood incident.

Days after the shooting, at a point where the motives for the massacre were obvious to most ordinary Americans, commentators, reporters, psychologists, and Army spokesmen were still “searching for a motive.” Hot on the trail of the real motive? For many Americans the point had been reached where such assurances carried only slightly more credibility than O.J. Simpson’s promise to search for his wife’s killer. Out of respect for Islam, society’s spokespersons had managed to cast themselves in the role of the boy who cried wolf–except that, in this case, it might be more accurate to picture a boy who cries “sheep” every time a wolf appears.

Read it.

You are dealing with people who can be targeted, and it is not necessary, under the rules in effect, to make a decision about whether the person could be detained.  You can shoot first.  There is no affirmative duty to ask first if they want to surrender.  In that case, the decision is not a serial one of decide whether you have an obligation to try and detain; and if it seems too dangerous then to strike to kill.  You are legally permitted to strike to kill, without warning and without obligation to offer surrender.  If that’s the case, and if the personal legal risks to you or your career, now or down the road, are as they are now, and disfavor interrogation or detention, then the incentive runs toward a targeted killing.

Read it.

Very cool.

Read it.

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

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To be sure, it was a year that saw plenty of bad news. But in almost every instance, there was offsetting good news:

Bad news: The economy remained critically weak, with rising unemployment, a severely depressed real-estate market, the near-collapse of the domestic automobile industry and the steep decline of the dollar.

Good news: Windows 7 sucked less than Vista.

Bad news: The downward spiral of the newspaper industry continued, resulting in the firings of thousands of experienced reporters and an apparently permanent deterioration in the quality of American journalism.

Good news: A lot more people were tweeting.

Bad news: Ominous problems loomed abroad as — among other difficulties — the Afghanistan war went sour, and Iran threatened to plunge the Middle East and beyond into nuclear war.

Good news: They finally got Roman Polanski.

Read it.

He ought to come to the U.S., where such a video would be a qualification for Governor or Senator, if not President.

If he were caught on video with three boys, however, he could only be a Congressman from Massachusetts. Sorry.

Read it. Points to note:

1. These people are not trying to sneak into France. They are already in France. They are trying to sneak into Britain. Apparently France isn’t good enough. Can’t fault their judgment.
2. France has established a camp near the relevant transport links to serve those wanting to sneak into Britain as a convenient staging area, rather than shipping them back where they came from. Thanks a lot, France.
3. One wonders what the British government is doing about all this. If such camps were established by the Mexican government by our southern border, would the U.S. government not be taking some sort of action against it? Oh, wait — they are, and it isn’t. Forget I even mentioned it.

Read it.

Gambetta and Hertog find that “the share of radical Islamic engineers is no less than nine times greater than the share we could expect if the proneness of engineers to radicalize was the same as that of the male adult population.”

Once again we find our noses rubbed in the fact that intelligence and wisdom do not correlate.

Read it.

And why not? The Useful Idiots of the West allow them to get away with it.

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The greatest strength of America is that people want to live there.

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Early reports about the failed Christmas bombing of NW 253 raise questions that need answers.  Because, frankly, if the reports are true, al Qaeda never should have gotten this close to a successful attack.

Read it.

Whether such constant exposure to corporate socialism is a symptom or a cause of why California is a social and financial basket case is an exercise left to the reader.

Read it.

Smart, responsive and elegant, the Copenhagen Wheel is a new emblem
for urban mobility. It transforms ordinary bicycles quickly into hybrid e-bikes that also
function as mobile sensing units. The Copenhagen Wheel allows you to capture
the energy dissipated while cycling and braking and save it for when you need
a bit of a boost. It also maps pollution levels, traffic congestion,
and road conditions in real-time.

Soon to be an entry in the Stuff White People Like web site, I suspect.

Read it.

Read it.

Sign me up.

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Some of the greenest technologies of the age, from electric cars to efficient light bulbs to very large wind turbines, are made possible by an unusual group of elements called rare earths. The world’s dependence on these substances is rising fast.

Just one problem: These elements come almost entirely from China, from some of the most environmentally damaging mines in the country, in an industry dominated by criminal gangs.

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Here’s a story to round off the year: a murderous New York gangster tripped over his own baggy trousers last week and fell to his death. Hector Quinones, 44, was in the middle of an apparently drugs-related killing spree when his low-slung trousers fell down and tripped him up. One of his would-be victims fled on to the fire escape of her apartment block; Quinones yanked up his trousers and struggled after her, but no sooner had he reached the fire escape than they fell down again, and he toppled overboard.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

I don’t think that ever happened to a zoot suit….

Read it.

So when they tell you this is going to save money, you’ll know it for a barefaced lie.

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A key part of the programme entails undoing some of the damage done to buildings by British Rail.

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Socialism migrates from New England to the Great Lakes.

Ms. Berry owns her own business—yet the Michigan Department of Human Services claims she is a government employee and union member. The agency thus withholds union dues from the child-care subsidies it sends to her on behalf of her low-income clients. Those dues are funneled to a public-employee union that claims to represent her. The situation is crazy—and it’s happening elsewhere in the country.

A year ago in December, Ms. Berry and more than 40,000 other home-based day care providers statewide were suddenly informed they were members of Child Care Providers Together Michigan—a union created in 2006 by the United Auto Workers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The union had won a certification election conducted by mail under the auspices of the Michigan Employment Relations Commission. In that election only 6,000 day-care providers voted. The pro-labor vote turned out.

Many of the state’s other 34,000 day-care providers never even realized what was going on. Ms. Berry tells us she was “shocked” to find out she was suddenly in a union. The real dirty work, however, had been done when the state created an “employer” for the union to “organize” against.

This is the way unions in Communist countries are made a partner of the State.

Today the Department of Human Services siphons about $3.7 million in annual dues to the union—from the child-care subsidies. The money should be going to home-based day-care providers—themselves not on the high end of the income scale. Ms. Berry now sees money once paid to her go to a union that does little for her. She says she is “self employed and wants nothing to do with the union.”

Your tax dollars at work.

Read it.

Three or four attention-starved twits doth not a dysfunctional society make.

But still, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion something’s bollywonkers here.

No shit.