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Spring does not bring to mind apples, but with the start of the growing season a nonprofit group called Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT), which works with Slow Food, has declared this the year of the heirloom apple.

SWPL food you can believe in.

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The department ruled that white voters in Kinston will vote for blacks only if they are Democrats and that therefore the city cannot get rid of party affiliations for local elections because that would violate black voters’ right to elect the candidates they want.

The decision, made by the same Justice official who ordered the dismissal of a voting rights case against members of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia, has irritated other locals as well. They bristle at federal interference in this city of nearly 23,000 people, two-thirds of whom are black.

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

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Despite claims to the contrary, internal emails from the University of California, Irvine’s Muslim Student Union (MSU) show that the group orchestrated the repeated disruptions of a speech given on campus by Israeli ambassador Michael Oren February 8.

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

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Where can we get a blow-up Obama?

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And oh, the ring that would leave around the Mediterranean….

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We’re way too tolerant of this. Once it crosses into out-and-out lying, it’s no longer virtuous to be tolerant of it. And I’m sorry, once you’re protesting for your right to wear a tuxedo to the prom when you’re a girl, that’s not about being left alone to live your own life in a manner of your choosing. That’s about being a walking fucking billboard.

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You knew it had to happen.

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Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

At a senior center in Manchester Wednesday, one woman turned away when Hodes offered his outstretched hand for an introduction.

“I don’t want to shake your hand. You voted for health care, so just go,” snapped Carmen Guimond, as she refocused on her lunch of roast beef and mashed potatoes and waved him on.

When Hodes decided to stay at the table and launch a defense of what’s considered to be one of the more popular provisions of the law — closing the “doughnut hole,” a gap in prescription drug coverage for Medicare recipients — she challenged him about whether he had read the entire bill and dismissed his explanation.

“Two hundred and forty dollars in the first year. That’s all it is,” she said, referring to the initial subsidy. “That’s not much.”

“And over time, by 2020, it closes the doughnut hole,” Hodes said.

“We’ll all be dead by then,” she deadpanned.

Read it. And the blog post it references.

This is an interesting topic that deserves more thought.

John Stossel turns over a rock.

Much government interference with our peaceful pursuits is based on junk science and junk economics. Politicians know a lot of stuff that isn’t so. So do reporters.

Let me count some of the ways.

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Don’t axe your Counts before they’ve chickened.

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

Warmly glowing gold,
What gives it that autumn hue?
Relativity.

Heh.

The house at 10512 Baldy Mountain Rd. in Sandpoint, Idaho, looks like just another vacant foreclosed home. Some appliances, a bathroom mirror and even the hot tub are missing. The dining room of the three-bedroom house has water damage.

But this isn’t your run-of-the-mill problem house. Call it an Extreme Foreclosure. The 3,678-square-foot McMansion is a product of the popular “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” reality television show. It isn’t the only “Extreme” home to fall on hard times.

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One would have thought that Prohibition had taught the country that such things merely lead to rampant crime and violence. Government in the modern world seems chiefly to serve as an illustration of the medieval concept of Invincible Ignorance.

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(1)  The man knows burgers; I like burgers.

Very persuasive.

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Looking back, one of the striking revelations of the past two years of recession is that the pattern of real-estate development and capital investment in America has been driven for two decades and more by a very peculiar system of finance — one that depends on an intricate infrastructure of speculative debt; one that is enabled by modern technology and wedded to abstraction and formula; and one that, it turns out, can only be maintained, in a pinch, by intervention from the state.

The modern mind broke down on account of its infatuation with abstraction. That mind is singularly susceptible to falsely imagining that ideas are more real than men. The power of the lapidary theory over the modern mind has been often remarked. The whole of the twentieth century was marked by calamitous wars driven by the imperial impulse of what Edmund Burke called “armed doctrines.” Armies, impelled by their doctrines, rolled over half the earth, leaving behind blood and smolders.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Check it out.

The Other McCain gives Conor Friedersdorf a well-deserved spanking.

The facts may be in dispute, but apparently no argument is permissible. Freidersdorf condemns Shaidle for “casual bigotry against Hispanics and blacks,” and condemns Steyn for “uncritically pass[ing] along” her views to readers of the Corner. This assumes that readers of the Corner lack the discernment to decide for themselves whether they agree or disagree with Shaidle. Must Steyn include a disclaimer with every link to Shaidle? “WARNING: This person may occasionally say things I do not endorse.”

Ann Althouse is scratching her head.

IN SHORT: It’s a medium size, medium weight device that has some use, but it’s a distant third in usefulness after the laptop and the iPhone.

Eric Raymond is scratching his head.

The Newton was a fascinating technology demonstration, but it sank almost without trace because nobody ever found a real use for it. It was too large to fit in a pocket and underpowered for replacing a real computer…like the iPad. And the thing that has me scratching my head, two days after the iPad announcement and knowing it has sold 300K copies in that time on the strength of Apple’s brand, is that I can’t find a real use for it either.

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I prefer magnetic holding strips, but if I used a knife block, this is the one I would use.

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Sister Mary Joseph. In the library. With a ruler.

Problem solved.

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Time to get ready for summer, Roy.

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Read it.

Anti-Semitism on North American college campuses has become so routine that most incidents merit little attention in the media. The nucleus of any confrontation is usually opposition to “Zionism”, and forms around a coalition of Leftists and Muslim supporters of “Palestine”. By their logic, all Jews must be overt or covert supporters of Israel, so opposing the Zionist entity typically segues into hatred of Jews in general, who are thus considered legitimate targets for protesters.

Joe Wikert has seen the light.

It only took a couple of hours of iPad use to realize I’ll never touch my Kindle again.  Ever.  All my Kindle books are now on my iPad.  Do I mind that the iPad’s backlit display isn’t as easy on my eyes as the Kindle’s?  No.  I read off that iPad display for about 10 hours on Saturday and my eyes felt the same as they did the day before.

The iPad has certainly killed any desire on my part to own a Kindle.

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I thought that, too.

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He said that Mr Brown had not looked him or any other servicemen in the eye at a reception in Downing Street in November 2008.

Then in Westminster Abbey during the Remembrance Day service last November he said the Prime Minister was “fidgeting and moving” during the two minute silence.

“I’ve got head and back injuries that put me back in hospital in a lot of pain quite regularly, so if I could do it there’s no reason he couldn’t,” he said. “It was very rude.

What a guy.

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For people with nothing better to do with their time.

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Tiptoe through the TULIP.

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I’d vote for him.

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Be careful what you look for, you just might find it.

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Why Brits just can say ’49 pounds’ escapes me. But that’s a huge fargin rabbit.

Geoffrey Pullum is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it any more.

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

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Why is writing software not like engineering? The answer lies in a single fundamental difference with far-reaching ramifications: engineering is constrained by the real, physical world and software is not. While obvious, this is the crucial difference that explains why software development is harder to get right. The next few sections explore these ramifications.

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Our Flemish correspondent VH reported on Thursday about the silencing of Benno Barnard at the University of Antwerp. Dr. Barnard was about to give a lecture on the differences between Islam and Christianity, but loud shouting and threats from a crowd of young Muslims forced the cancellation of his talk.

Still waiting for an instance of a Muslim speaker having to cancel his talk because of shouting and threats from a crowd of young Christians or Jews.

Just sayin’.

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Hey, mutants deserve fame, too. And pizza, of course.

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Because I want you all to get arteriosclerosis and die. But happy.

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To illustrate what a growing number of literary scholars consider the most exciting area of new research, Lisa Zunshine, a professor of English at the University of Kentucky, refers to an episode from the TV series “Friends.”

I’m sure she does. How would you like to go through life with a name like ‘Zunshine’?

Now English professors and graduate students are asking them too. They say they’re convinced science not only offers unexpected insights into individual texts, but that it may help to answer fundamental questions about literature’s very existence: Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read?

An even more fundamental question is, Who the hell cares?

At a time when university literature departments are confronting painful budget cuts, a moribund job market and pointed scrutiny about the purpose and value of an education in the humanities, the cross-pollination of English and psychology is a providing a revitalizing lift.

Oh, yes, I forgot: Tenure doesn’t grow on trees.

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An al-Qaeda death squad dressed in military uniforms stormed homes in a suburb of south Baghdad and killed up to 25 people including women and children, Iraqi authorities said.

And people complain that al-Qaeda don’t wear uniforms….

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A Dutch Moroccan policeman, lionized for his service to the Netherlands and presented as a shining example of an “assimilated” immigrant, turns out to be a spy for Morocco. Under pressure from the land of his ethnic heritage, he agreed to pass on secret information (possibly about fellow Dutch Moroccans) to Moroccan intelligence.

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

People tend to forget (because they don’t think that way, and can’t understand how anybody could think that way about something so peripheral as religion) that Muslims are loyal to Islam and fellow Muslims before all else, certainly before whatever Dar-al-Harb country they might be living in for the time being.

In the Good Old Days people used their common sense and realized this sort of thing as a potential problem and, for example, never really fully trusted ethnic German, Italian, and Japanese during World War II. But in these degenerate modern times we are no longer permitted to use common sense but must all do the happy-clappy Diversity Dance, hoping that keep our eyes closed we’ll be invisible to the evil men who live to kill us.

We have a new comic strip link. It’s on the right, beneath Frazz (although only in a positional sense).

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And why ought it? The Bible isn’t intended as history but as moral instruction. One could as pointlessly worry about the ‘discrepancies’ in Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Aesop’s Fables. Either you get the point or you don’t — and, sadly, the Lame Stream Media typically don’t.

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What would you do if you only had half a body? Well, of course you would get all tatted up and dress like a dork. That’s obvious.

Gina Trapani speaks for me.

Next year’s iPad will be faster, cheaper, less buggy, and have better apps and worthy competitors. Let all the deep-pocketed Jobs apostles be your canaries into the iPad coalmine. Give developers time to fix their apps to work well on the iPad. Give Apple a year to lower prices on faster hardware and fill in all the gaping feature holes. (Remember how long early iPhone owners lived without copy and paste?)

Hear, hear.

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A distillation of all the things you know unconsciously but probably never had the inclination to put together. We do these things so that you don’t have to.

Cultural trends now fashionable in the West favour an egalitarian approach to life. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly engineered mass production machine. Geneticists and sociologists especially go out of their way to prove, with an impressive apparatus of scientific data and formulations that all men are naturally equal and if some are more equal than others, this is attributable to nurture and not to nature. I take an exception to this general view. It is my firm conviction, supported by years of observation and experimentation, that men are not equal, that some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence. Although convinced that fraction of human beings are stupid and that they are so because of genetic traits, I am not a reactionary trying to reintroduce surreptitiously class or race discrimination. I firmly believe that stupidity is an indiscriminate privilege of all human groups and is uniformly distributed according to a constant proportion.

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A distillation of the Crustian worldview. Usually they aren’t this honest.

What’s wrong with this picture? Air America vanishes into the ether, while Glenn Beck indoctrinates 2.7 million daily viewers with his histrionic brand of right-wing lunacy. Independent news agencies must continuously solicit donations from readers to stay afloat, while hate-filled shock jock Rush Limbaugh makes $50 million a year.

Of course, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with this picture in the eyes of anybody who realizes that broadcasting is a business and in that business those who produce content that people are willing to pay for will win out of people who don’t. ‘Progressives’ are champions at refusing to accept this reality and feel moved to make up their own facts to substitute for those that the world hands them. (Anybody who can call Rush Limbaugh a ‘shock jock’ with a straight face has so tenuous a connection with reality that it’s probably a medical condition.)

The Nation and TheNation.com are part of a progressive journalistic community that is challenging the right in every medium.

To massive yawns. That’s what burns their asses the most, and leads to the meme that The People are just too stupid to know what’s good for them. Funny how that works.

Below are ten steps you can take to help keep progressive journalism alive:….

Needless to say, it’s also a great blueprint for resisting ‘progressive’ journalism. Take whatever action you think is appropriate.

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

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There’s a reason most of us aren’t Cory Doctorow. We don’t want to open up our devices. We don’t want to hack them. We want them to just goddamned work, thanks, and if gluing the case shut makes that possible, bring on the Elmers.

Hate that as much as you want, old-school corner-cases, but it’s the future, it always has been. It’s called “progress,” the continual refinement of the social contract. And it’s no more a betrayal of something vital than any other decision made in rational self-interest. Make your arguments about DRM and closed systems and “Wal-Martization”, but they still don’t come anywhere close to tipping the scale. The iPad (or something like it) is the future of computing for an enormous slice of the population — despite all its political and philosophical flaws — because it’s a pretty goddamned great future. It’s a future that we want.

There is a not-always-visible tension inside the Avante Garde between people who are self-proclaimed ‘progressives’ politically and socially but who are closet libertarians technologically, and those who carry the ‘progressive’ I-Love-Big-Brother corporatist mindset through to its logical conclusion. This appears to be a rant by one of the latter ripping (en passant) one of the former. It’s pretty amusing, and also very illuminating regarding the practical effects of the ‘progressive’ point of view.