Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

To All My Liberal Friends:
Please accept with no obligation, implied or explicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2010, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere. Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

To All My Conservative Friends:
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Read it.

Read it.

It is all about winning. The other half of what’s wrong, is that these are the people who want to erase fissures between us in — everything. Class, wealth, prestige, national borders, “partisan bickering,” race, sex, sexual preference, creed, snips, snails and puppy dog’s tails. We’re all just on spaceship earth together…

…it’s complete bullshit. Their primal urge is to win. They want an elite club, and if nobody is excluded from it then nobody can be in it. They are dedicated to keeping us divided, and then making sure their side wins. And then, to make sure something emerges from the victory, something locked in, so that we’re stuck with it forever and ever, without regard to how unpopular it becomes. And then they want to win at the next thing.

Read it.

Read it. And watch the video.

Nobody seems to be entirely sure whether this is constitutional. I don’t have a clear answer either. But it certainly does effectively defeat the purpose of having an elected legislature, and it’s certainly in direct conflict with the spirit of Article I.

The first thing that socialists do when they get power — the first thing — is work to eliminate democracy, because any shred of democracy threatens their hold on power, and power is what they’re all about. Lenin did it in Russia, Mussolini did it in Italy, Hitler did it in Germany, Stalin did it in Eastern Europe, Mao did it in China, Castro did it in Cuba, Chavez and Morales are doing it in South America, and Obama and Reid and Pelosi are doing it in the United States. Watch it coming down the street.

Check it out.

Check it out.

I want one of these for my house.

Read it.

Thieves stole a JCB digger from a building site, smashed through a fence and used the vehicle to wrench two parking meters out of the ground and shake the coins out, police said.

The culprits, thought to be two men, started up the mini-digger after breaking into the site and finding it still had the key in the ignition.

We have the technology. And, if left unsecured, it can be re-purposed.

Read it.

My, what a surpise.

Gene pool. Cull. Now.

Read it.

An Egyptian court confirmed the four-year jail sentence imposed on an Egyptian student blogger for posting writings critical of Islam and the government, the state news agency MENA said.

Your future under Islam. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Read it.

SURE she wants us to use alternative sources of energy. Maybe on another planet.

Hey! Wake up! When a Democrat tells you s/he believes in something, it’s NOT TRUE.

Read it.

And yet the ‘why can’t we all just get along’ crowd persist in believing that a Communist country won’t behave like a Communist country.

Read it.

A Chinese villager has been jailed for 12 years for shooting and eating the country’s last known wild Indochinese tiger, China Daily reports.

Bet he won’t do that again.

Jerry Pournelle really doesn’t like the new health care plan.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an editorial worth your attention. There is no better term for the ObamaCare Bill than Despotism. It’s all very well for Congressmen and Senators to look out for their states, but this bill is a pure transfer payment from Republicans to Democrats. There is built into the bill a 40% tax on the most comprehensive — and thus most expensive — health care plans: But it does not apply to everyone. Longshoremen, for instance, are exempt — and of course their unions have negotiated some of the most comprehensive healthcare short of what Congress gets. Other lines of work, nearly all heavily unionized, are exempt from the 40% tax (which will pretty well eliminate these plans for those who aren’t exempt from the tax). Also, 17 States will be exempt; for the rest it’s just too bad. There is no attempt at an explanation for these arbitrary transfers from those taxed to those not taxed. There is no logical reason why some are taxed and some are not. It’s simply a set of earmarks, rewards to those supporting the “plan” and punishment for those who don’t.

Read it.

White people can do powerful things with their eyes: casting judgment, indicating scorn, and obnoxiously rolling them when someone says something they don’t agree with. Yet in spite of these powers, they are not immune to the dangers of the sun. So white people must wear sunglasses. But what may surprise you is that while white people will spend upwards of three months finding a perfect pair of unique prescription glasses, they have no such requirement for sunglasses.

Cringely thinks so, anyway.

Read it.

Buy ’em books, send ’em to school….

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

A few weeks back, Reason.tv discussed Canadians coming to the U.S. for operations that would take forever to get in the Great White North.

Reason contributing editor and San Francisco Chronicle journo Carolyn Lochhead has a fascinating piece on American medical tourists who go elsewhere for much cheaper and equally good care….

Read it.

Chinese police were held in a hour-long stand-off with a suspected suicide bomber only to find the man was armed with sausages.

Well, at least we know he wasn’t a Muslim. That’s something.

Always thought that ‘suicide bombers’ were a bunch of wieners, anyway….

Read it.

One fully-loaded B52 would raise the average IQ in Britain beyond all imagining.

Read it.

Although why anybody would give a shit at this point is impossible to discern.

Check it out.

Read it.

A fascinating discussion from supposedly intelligent and certainly technically knowledgeable people. We are doomed, as John Derbyshire (Patron Saint of Dyspepsia) says in his latest book.

Read it.

It’s always amusing when a newspaper invites in a guest editorialist who then disembowels a policy that the paper had a major hand in setting up.

Read it. I guess they’ve decommissioned the carrier of that name.

I wish I were forty years younger so that I could serve on such a ship. The future is now.

More here, to the extent that Wikipedia can be trusted.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

David Pogue reveals why everybody hates the phone company.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about two particularly nasty Verizon Wireless practices. First, Verizon doubled the early-cancellation fee for smartphones, the price you pay for canceling before your two-year contract is up (it’s now $350).

Second, I passed along a note from a Verizon whistleblower who identified a really outrageous Verizon profit center: if you accidentally hit one of the arrow keys on your Verizon cellphone (which come premapped to various Verizon Internet functions), you’re charged $2 instantaneously, even if you cancel instantly. (Verizon confirms that on many models, you can’t remap those buttons to other functions even if you’re tech-savvy enough to try.)

Apparently there is no cell phone provider in the U.S. that doesn’t suck.

Read it.

What is it about being elected to public office that makes people stupid? New England was, at one time, a bastion of individual liberty and self-reliance; it is rapidly turning into Little Europe.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom wants the city to require similar labels.

Quelle surprise.

Boland uses a cell phone, but keeps it away from her head by using the speaker. The AP story also says she leaves the phone turned off unless she’s expecting a call.

And, of course, nothing will do but that EVERYBODY IN THE STATE ought to be FORCED BY LAW to do it her way — sort of an inverse Burger King.

Read it.

Read it.

Facebook is being cited in almost one in five of online divorce petitions, lawyers have claimed.

Yet another reason to stay away from Facebook and its ilk.

Macworld.

Read it.

Cocaine’s a hell of a drug, and even more so when laced with another drug that’s commonly used to deworm opossums. Federal agents have found that 69 percent of cocaine shipments seized entering the United States contain levamisole, a veterinary drug linked to serious weakening of the immune system in humans. Here’s the real funny part: no one knows why.

Go, Darwin. Cull that gene pool.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was. (Sounds more like the name of a multi-national engergy conglomerate, doesn’t it?)

Of course, this just might be hot air, considering how low Wikipedia’s rep has gotten lately. But it makes an interesting story.

Read it.

Surely there’s a movie in that somewhere.

Read it.

I think this counts as a virtual Darwin Award. Let that be a lesson to us all.

Truth.

Read it.

Your government at work. Aren’t you proud?

Read it.

What’s the use of being a supermodel if you don’t get special treatment? I mean, duh.

Darwin says: Drop the Communist Manifesto and step away from the gene pool. Now.

Read it.

Every now and then, someone does a brilliant analysis of contemporary cultural phenomena.

This is one such.

Arnold Kling continues to be always worth reading.

A point that I keep making about higher education is that it is, like the Harvard-Goldman filter, a form of recursive credentialism. To get certain jobs, you need certain credentials. And the most important credential of all is that you must signal your support for credentialism.

Arnold Kling is always worth reading.

The Harvard-Goldman filter works like this.

1. To get into a position of power, you have to pass through a filter. The easiest way to show that you can pass through the filter is to go to Harvard and then work for Goldman.

2. If you do not go to Harvard and work for Goldman, then you have to show that you can get along with people who did.

3. The best way to show that you can get along with people who pass the Harvard-Goldman filter is to show that you believe in applying the Harvard-Goldman filter.

Why was Tim Geithner regarded as such an obvious, in fact necessary, choice to be Treasury Secretary? Because he satisfies the Harvard-Goldman filter, particularly point (3). He is not going to bring people from the wrong social caste into the policymaking arena.

True-believer commitment to credentialism is a foundational principle for the Crust, which is why obviously smart but equally obviously foolish people like Chomsky and Krugman (and Obama) are so solidly situated.

The Other McCain takes out the trash.

There are a number of people these days who are persistently characterized by dinosaur media hacks as ‘conservative’ despite a complete lack of evidence aside from the fact that they occasionally say a good word about what the dinosaur media hacks consider to be the ‘conservative position’ on a topic. David Brooks comes immediately to mind, as does Malcolm Gladwell and Andrew Sullivan, but certainly Friedersdorf fits in this bag. Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me to find the New York Times someday tag unrepentant Trotskyite Christopher Hitchens as a ‘conservative’ because he correctly appreciates the threat that Islam poses to Western Civ and doesn’t hesitate to talk about it.

Read it.

So and so is calling for you, please hold and I’ll get him.

Read it.

For sufficiently flexible values of ‘beauty’, of course.

Read it.

A lot of people talk about reviving the domestic manufacturing sector, which has shed almost one-third of its manpower over the last eight years. But some of the people I spoke to asked a slightly different question: Even if you could reclaim a chunk of those blue-collar jobs, would you have the managers you need to supervise them? It’s not obvious that you would.