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Men prefer the smell of petrol and frying bacon to that of a newborn baby, a study has found.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know….

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One lesson that Democrats learned from the failure of HillaryCare in 1994 is that they had to buy the silence, if not the outright support, of the business class. They’ve done this brilliantly by peddling the illusion that ObamaCare will “lower costs” for employers.

But slowly as the legislative details become clear, it is dawning on executives of businesses large and small that reform is boiling down to a huge tax increase to finance a gigantic new entitlement. The cost and quality of care are afterthoughts that will both suffer, as a growing roll of medical experts have been writing on these pages.

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That’s precisely what happened in 2007 to Paul Wolfowitz, who was run out of the World Bank on the pretext that he had given his girlfriend a raise. In fact, Mr. Wolfowitz had made bank officials aware that his girlfriend already worked at the bank before he accepted the job as president, and bank officials had raised no objection to the job change that removed his girlfriend from any direct reporting to Mr. Wolfowitz. The ethical uproar was a politically convenient excuse, fanned by the media, to oust Mr. Wolfowitz when his real offense was that he was too hard on corruption.

So it’s going to be fascinating to see how the press corps and political class react to the news that Montana Senator Max Baucus recommended a staff member who was his girlfriend for the plum job of U.S. Attorney. Mr. Baucus disclosed the attempted sweetheart deal early Saturday after media inquiries made clear the story was breaking. The 67-year-old Senator disclosed that he had recommended Melodee Hanes and two others earlier this year for the U.S. Attorney post in Montana. While Presidents appoint U.S. attorneys, by tradition home-state Senators have significant influence in the selection, especially Senators from the same party as the President.

My advice: Don’t hold your breath waiting for it.

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Perhaps it’s just that time of month.

Eric Raymond on Climategate.

That’s a theme in a lot of recent revelations. As long as the lid was on the CRU’s fraud, nobody dared speak up about for fear of being dismissed as a crank. Now that the AGW crowd’s power to suppress dissent has been broken, expect to hear a lot more actual scientists — not politicians, but scientists — coming forward to confirm that the emperor has no clothes.

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That could be useful.

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The death certificate of Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the legendary First World War German flying ace better known as ‘Red Baron’, has been discovered in Poland.

Actually, he was known as ‘the Red Knight’ until Schulz put Snoopy atop his doghouse with goggles.

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Rather a long way from Tennyson here, aren’t we?

But, of course, the same could be said for modern Britain as a hole whole.

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Liam Clancy, who died on December 4 aged 74, was the last surviving member of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, the first and arguably the most authentic of the Irish folk groups to make an impact far beyond their homeland over the last half-century; rated by Bob Dylan “the best ballad singer I ever heard in my life”, he was also a fine guitarist.

I have an album on which Tommy Makem introduces Liam as ‘the young fellow over there, Liam Clancy’. Makes me feel old, I’m telling you.

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The commanding officer and highest-ranking enlisted sailor aboard the Norfolk-based destroyer James E. Williams were removed in the wake of a fraternization scandal that erupted on a recent deployment.

Rosi would not comment on the nature of the Williams’ fraternization cases, but said that nine sailors received non-judicial punishment for fraternization. Five were male chief petty officers, he said, and four were female junior enlisted sailors: one first class petty officer, two second class petty officers and one third class petty officer.

Well, you know, there was a reason why women didn’t used to be assigned to ships….

Steve Sailer is the gift that keeps on giving.

Medical slang appears to be slowly dying out due to the discovery process in lawsuits, but it offered a rich lexicon when I first learned of it in the 1980s from a friend who worked in an emergency room.

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Gives you some idea of what America will be like if the Democrats have their way.

(Bitter? Who’s bitter?)

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This is a list of modern-day carcinogens. Tumors. Things that have a toxic effect. Things that will continue to degrade our culture, make it unhealthy…dysfunctional…by their existence, and by their proximity to other things. Some of them are not causes; they are symptoms, showing by their presence that something malignant is churning away madly under the surface, something that would go undetected otherwise. So that’s it. Causes; symptoms; the balance of what’s left, would be things that, in traditional parlance, are just-plain-uncalled-for.

And people say that I’m a grump … Ha!

I especially like #22. And #28 is right on.

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In Wayne County, law enforcement officials regularly seize vehicles without levying charges — even in cases in which they later concede no law was broken. The agency provides perhaps the most prolific and egregious example of what critics contend is the wrongful use of laws allowing the seizure of private property.

It’s a practice that’s paying off. The Wayne County Sheriff’s Office, which helps run the prosecutor’s forfeiture unit, took in $8.69 million from civil seizures in 2007, more than four times the amount collected in 2001. The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office gets up to 27 percent of that money.

Remember: Whatever you think the government exists to do is wrong. Governments exist to hire and pay government workers, and they have guns at their disposal.

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Schumpeter. Creative destruction. You can look it up.

Read it. And watch the video.

The U.S. unemployment numbers are out today, and most headlines will show that the U.S. unemployment rate in November was 10.0 percent, down from 10.2 percent in October. That number is depressingly large, but even that under-counts the true number of unemployed. For instance, it doesn’t count those people who don’t have a job and have given up looking for one, or those who have found marginal part-time work but still can’t make ends meet and are still looking for a full-time job.

The government keeps stats on all of these “marginally attached workers” and people “employed part time for economic reasons” (rather than by choice). If you add all of those people in, the total unemployment rate in the U.S. is 17.2 percent, compared to 12.6 percent a year ago. The only good news is that number is down from 17.5 percent in October.

And we’re supposed to put our health care in the hands of people who lie to us this way. What a great idea.

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Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.

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Jane Austen will readily provide us with a moral compass, if we have the wit to take advantage of it.

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

Under the laws of war and the Geneva conventions, these guys are unlawful combatants, which we are entitled to shoot out of hand wherever found. Imagine how much better life would be if that had happened. I wonder what it was like under Roosevelt, when the government actually had some purpose in life other than taxes and spending.

Check it out.

Really, it’s not all that hard to get that many dicks in one place at a University….

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Let this be a lesson to us all: Steer clear of Homowners Associations, the closest thing in America to living in the old Soviet Union.

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Remember too that when you have a progressive tax system, especially when there are surcharges on people making seven-figure incomes, you also have a system where for any given level of national income, the greater the inequality, the greater the government’s tax revenues. And indeed federal revenues have been rising faster than median wages for decades now, thanks to the rich getting ever richer.

Given the government’s insatiable appetite for cash, it’s only natural that it would prefer to tax plutocrats, spending some of that money on poorer Americans, rather than move to a world where poorer Americans earn more (but still don’t pay that much in taxes), and the plutocrats earn less, depriving the national fisc of untold billions in revenue.

The government’s interests, then, are naturally aligned with those of the plutocrats — and when that happens, the chances of change naturally drop to zero.

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Apparently it could be caused by global warming. Whatever they teach in journalism school, blushing is apparently not included.

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One must admit that it is rather cute.

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If the cost of assembling a Big Mac were higher than its selling price, McDonald’s would soon drop it from the menu. Capitalists know that when you’re losing money on each unit of production, you can’t make it up in volume. The lesson has dawned on the United States Mint, which reports that because of the high price of zinc and copper, manufacturing a penny now costs 1.38 cents.

This development brings to mind economist Ludwig von Mises’ observation about the causes of inflation. “Government,” he said, “is the only agency which can take a useful commodity like paper, slap some ink on it, and make it totally worthless.”

I remember when a penny was worth something. But that was a while ago.

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

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As blanket of ozone over southern pole seals up, temperatures on continent could soar by 3C, increasing sea level rise by 1.4m.

Oh, no! Are we going to see PSAs with penguins dropping from the skies, now?

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I guess they were right.

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

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Three years ago, a Soviet defector was assassinated on British soil. Why was he murdered? And who was behind it? In the most detailed account of the killing yet, former Russian military intelligence officer Boris Volodarsky reveals all.

Few bear in mind that, before democracy broke out in Russia, Vladimir Putin was a career KGB officer. Would you trust one of Heydrich’s boys in charge of post-war Germany?

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Prior to New Labour, it would have been ‘House of Lords Rules in Favour of Sark Feudal System’, which would make a lot more sense.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

The Other McCain says:

Gluteoplasty? She died trying to get a bigger butt? I’m sorry, but why didn’t someone tell her about the miraculous American butt-growth formula known as bacon double cheeseburger?

A senseless tragedy . . .

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Sugru is a silicone, which can be used to glue things together, patch leaky boots, or create a variety of custom-made handles, hooks, and feet for wobbly chair legs.

It has the appearance of children’s modelling clay, which once out of its airtight packet, can be moulded into any shape and fixed onto leather, metal, ceramic, wood and plastic. After about 24 hours it “cures” and will adhere to any substance with the strength of ultra strong glue but it does not become rock hard. Instead, it stays slightly flexible.

Good stuff, Maynard.

Steve Sailer is the gift that keeps on giving.

The funny thing is that Britain was just about the only advanced nation that didn’t pass a law calling for the sterilization of mentally retarded people in the 20th Century. (The very progressive Swedes were doing this into the mid-1970s.) Why not? Largely, because another one of Darwin’s relatives, a member of the Wedgwood family, took a strong stand against it in the House of Lords.

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One of the principal arguments used against suburbanization is that its infrastructure is too expensive to provide. As a result, planners around the high income world have sought to draw boundaries around growing urban areas, claiming that this approach is less costly and that it allows current infrastructure to be more efficiently used.

Like so many of the arguments (a more appropriate term would be “excuse”) used to frustrate the clear preferences about where people want to live and work, the infrastructure canard holds little water upon examination.

People talk about ‘sprawl’ as if it were a bad thing. I hear ‘sprawl’ and think ‘comfort’. I guess that’s what they really object to.

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When the D.C. Council votes Tuesday on a historic measure to legalize same-sex marriage in the District, one of the most visible faces of opposition will be an unlikely one: Catholic Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl, a mild-mannered man known for compromise, pragmatism and working behind the scenes.

That’s what happens with ‘compromise’ and ‘pragmatism’, which is prog-speak for ‘giving in’. Eventually you reach a point where you either (a) sell out completely, and the angels weep for you, or (b) you suddenly discover that the slippery slope is more slippery than you realized, and you go ‘Aaaaaaaaaaugh!’, thus pissing off the people who thought that they had rolled you. Either way you look like a moron. NTTAWWT.

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Not surprising, of course, to those of us who rightly consider facebook a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot exercise in narcissism. Whence comes this kick-me urge to broadcast private information to the entire world? Hopefully natural selection will delete these people from the gene pool.

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A fairly strong reminder that the U.N. is a force for evil in the world.

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I think that would be a splendid idea. We haven’t had a grownup in the White House since Coolidge.

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Most climatology papers submitted for peer review rely on large, complex and custom-written computer programs to produce their findings. The code for these programs is never provided to peer reviewers and even if it was, the peer climatologists doing the reviewing lack the time, resources and expertise to verify that the software works as its creators claim.

Even if the peer reviewers in climatology are as honest and objective as humanly possible, they cannot honestly say that they have actually preformed a peer review to the standards of other fields like chemistry or physics which use well-understood scientific hardware. (Other fields that rely on heavily on custom-written software have the same problem.)

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The emails and documents leaked last week from some of the world’s leading climatologists offer a rich trove of evidence that scientists were massaging the data and corrupting the scientific process to support their own preconceptions. But they also offer the beginnings of an explanation for why. In the words of another famous leaker, follow the money.

Here it all is in a nutshell.