Just trying to help out.

* Iran can have nukes, but you can’t have salt.

* Shape up voters, or we’ll get a cheap replacement for you from Mexico.

Read it.

I’d be tempted to rabbit-punch her until her brain wakes up.

Read it.

He’s everywhere! He’s everywhere! (Oh, sorry, that’s Chicken Man….)

Lileks.

“Please listen closely, as our menu options have changed for no apparent reason. If you are calling because you’re angry about something you read on the Huffington Post, please contact your son or daughter for instructions on not blaming us. For questions about e-mail, including the sloppy letter you sent to an old lover last night at 3 a.m. when you got back from the bar, please hit yourself in the head with a ball-peen hammer, you idiot. For questions about transferring service, press 4. For questions about transferring service to a country with lax banking laws and no extradition treaties, press IRS, and you will be instructed where to go for sentencing. For the problem you really want to solve, stab 8 repeatedly.

“Thank you. Please hold. The average hold time is [new voice; this guy sounded like the fellow who heats up the branding irons in a Spanish Inquisition deposition] TEN MINUTES.”

Read it.

Seven new albino killings have been reported in Tanzania and Burundi amid signs that the lucrative trade in their body parts has not waned.

Sure, these people are ready for self-government.

Read it.

Sometimes the system works.

Read it.

Just for perspective, consider whether a Canadian school would send kids home for wearing Canadian flags on the Fourth of July. The question answers itself.

Read it.

This is God telling you to STAY HOME.

Read it.

Identity politics raises its ugly head yet again. Lordy, I get tired of this shit. Some people just have nothing better to do than whine about stuff that Just Doesn’t Matter.

Where is Natural Selection when you really need it?

Read it.

Say not that the struggle naught availeth.

Arnold Kling holds up The Mirror.

Make a list of five to ten social issues that you feel are important. Next, make a list of five to ten social issues that you think government should stay out of. What is the intersection of those two sets? If it is zero, then you probably belong to the Church of Unlimited Government. If every social issue you care about (not just the top five or ten) is one where you want government to deal with it, then you definitely belong to the Church.

Charlie Stross has some interesting thoughts.

Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That’s the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry. Unless they can turn themselves into an entirely different kind of corporation by 2015 Apple is doomed to the same irrelevance as the rest of the PC industry — interchangable suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligable profit.

Read it.

Tax increases are driving London’s top money managers to pick up and move to Switzerland, Bloomberg News reports.

And who could blame them?

Read it.

Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.

Read it.

Read it.

This is the wave of the future. And you are here to see it.

Read it.

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Read it.

But they’ll all speak French, so nobody will care. Well, maybe Canadiens.

Mark Freeberg has a pretty good list.

Read it.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

The point of terrorism is not to “destroy.” It is to terrify. And for eight and a half years now, the dominant federal government response to terrorist threats and attacks has been to magnify their harm by increasing a mood of fear and intimidation. That is the real case against the ludicrous “orange threat level” announcements we hear every three minutes at the airport. It’s not just that they’re pointless, uninformative, and insulting to our collective intelligence; it’s that their larger effect is to make people feel frightened rather than brave.

Steve Sailer is on a roll.

David Brooks’s latest NYT column, “The Limits of Policy,” continues his pattern of picking up on my ideas, but expressing them gingerly enough to keep his job. There is a lot of good stuff in here, but enough Crimestop, too, so he doesn’t get Stephanie Graced.

Jerry Pournelle.

What I do not understand is why African Americans, who lose a lot of jobs to illegal immigrants, are not incensed at all this. The Republican Party freed the slaves, the Democratic Party kept the Solid South’s Jim Crow laws, so 90% of the blacks vote Democrat. I never did understand that one.

Neither do I.

Read it.

A mouse with eighteen buttons!

Read it.

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

Read it.

Schools are abandoning the practice of cutting up frogs, rats and animal organs which has been a mainstay of biology lessons for generations, out of concern for squeamish pupils and fears that they could turn their scalpels on each other.

… for multiculturalism.

Read it.

“Any neighbors?” I asked.

“A few. On the land next to us is a trailer. Woman lives there with her husband—and her ex-husband, who just got out of jail a few months ago.”

Some things had gone missing from his property, so soon after we arrived, he walked over to the vintage 1970s RV he kept there and opened the outside generator door. Generator gone. Obvious tracks leading directly back to the neighbors’ property. As soon as night fell, we heard a generator begin to hum in the distance.

There was not much that could be done, at the moment. It was at least an hour back to anything remotely resembling civilization, and there was no cell signal out here. We were armed, but disinclined to pursue the matter through unofficial means. A man who will live with his wife and her new husband is capable of pretty much anything. He may even have low self-esteem.

Read it.

Well, there’s a surprise.

Read it.

Really, that’s about all you did for us — gave us a lecture hall, gave us an arrogant bastard to listen to, and gave us a room full of computers we could use sometimes, and you gave us a degree that employers look at and say “This guy knows how to write reports. Amusing.” And I will be paying for this privilege until I am 51 years old.

Whenever I get a ‘give us money’ message from one of the three institutions from which I hold a degree, I always write ‘BITE ME’ on it in large black maker and send it back in the convenient reply envelope. That quiets things down for about six months.

Read it.

A group of villagers blockaded country lanes and formed a human barricade to stop travellers taking advantage of the Bank Holiday weekend to build a caravan site near their homes.

Gipsies in the past have used Bank Holidays to tarmac over fields because they know they have an extra day before council planning officers are back at their desks to halt development.

But residents in Meriden, near Solihull, West Midlands, swung into action after they spotted the travellers swarming onto the 10-acre field in the village just after the council offices closed at 5.30pm on Friday.

They had arrived with huge mechanical diggers, planning to rip up the ground, pour concrete bases for their mobile homes, and set up a permanent site.

UPDATE: Link fixed.

Read it.

To think of all the marvelous ways
They’re using plastic nowadays….

Lileks sounds the alarm.

Read it.

And an entire generation….

Read it.

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

Read it.

Islam is not as complicated as they would have you believe.

Read it.

meta meta meta meta meta meta meta….

Read it.

The metal-and-plastic outfit boasts eight electric motors that amplify the strength of the wearer’s arms and legs, as well as sensors that can detect movements and respond to commands through a voice-recognition system.

Read it.

After being blitzed with election pamphlets Roy Newman, 74, decided to tell other voters: “GET THE LOT OUT.”

But 90 minutes after he put up the sign up in an upstairs room at his house two police officers arrived and accused him of being racist.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in California.

Read it.

Richie Powell, 39, was booked on a flight to Scotland to take part in a wheelchair race.

But as he tried to board the plane at Bristol airport he was told: “You can only fly if you can walk up the aircraft steps.”

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably at the hands of somebody in the TSA.

Read it.

No, not the cereal.

Read it.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in D.C.

Read it.