Read it.

Spain is not what once it was.

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The little porker that could.

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Another excellent reason to avoid Facebook.

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In one of his essays a couple of years ago, El Inglés coined the phrase “deranged altruism” to describe the apparently suicidal policies practiced by virtually all Western nations. Our countries have deliberately imported millions of inassimilable foreigners, many (or most) of whom are either criminal, or indolent, or both. The new residents are showered with uncountable billions of euros, pounds, kroner, francs, and dollars — an investment which can never possibly pay for itself, no matter how many generations we wait.

A close cultural cousin to deranged altruism is an impulse that might be labeled “toxic tolerance”. This is the imperative never to offend anyone, no matter how evil, duplicitous, or exploitative they might be. We are brought up to be nice at all costs, so that the impulse to be accommodating and generous to those who do not deserve it — even when it is patently dangerous to do so — is acted upon with almost no conscious deliberation. Muslims, with their long tradition of scripturally-prescribed dishonesty, are especially adept at manipulating and exploiting our toxic tolerance.

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It’s clearly not easy, being Larry Summers. For all his millions, he still needs to travel from A to B, and keeps on finding himself stymied. First of all he lost his Harvard town car and chauffeur when he moved to Washington, and stood out there for demanding a similar car and driver in recompense for not getting the job of Fed chairman.

As an economist, Summers should know that it makes perfect sense for great resorts to spend enormous amounts of energy on the kind of quality he’s talking about: that’s their comparative advantage, the very heart of what they’re selling. Meanwhile, Summers isn’t really even the customer of the airports he’s passing through: the airlines are the customers, and the passengers are the goods being transported. So the airport doesn’t have much in the way of economic incentives to ease Summers’s way.

The Other McCain is irate.

[Lindsey] Graham tells us that he is “OK” with Murkowski keeping her ranking status.

Worthless bastard.

Don’t hold it in, Stacy, tell us how you really feel….

Read it.

I suspect that they’re trying to do too much with too little, here. But I suppose it’s worth exploring.

Update: Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so.

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The devices can be found currently in the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi, Bankshop in Reutlingen, Germany, The Westin Palace in Madrid, and the Orio al Serio International Airport, and they’ll be hitting Las Vegas and Florida sometime this year.

You have to distrust the motives of people who will give you real gold and take dirty paper or electrons. What do they know that you don’t?

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The extent to which vitamin D deficiency may increase susceptibility to a wide range of diseases is dramatically highlighted in newly published research. Scientists have mapped the points at which vitamin D interacts with our DNA — and identified over two hundred genes that it directly influences.

So remember to take your vitamins.

Megan McArdle is always worth reading.

In many cases, frozen produce is superior to the industrially farmed stuff trucked a zillion miles to your house:  out of season, for example, you are better off baking with frozen fruit, which is picked ripe and flash frozen near to its source, than using “fresh” fruits which are picked green so that they can withstand the lengthy journey to your house.

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See ads on the page? Chances are the publisher gets paid by the pageviews—maybe not directly, but the volume of traffic is what dictates the price of the ads. This means that to make money they have to get you to visit as many pages as possible on their site. Doesn’t matter what you do on the page, they can’t track that effectively yet, all that matters is that the ads load.

The swine.

This creates a tension between you and the publisher since the motivations for your visit differ. You’re there because you want to learn, be informed, or be entertained. The publisher wants you there because they’re making money for having you there. They make even more money when you browse more of their pages, loading more ads in the process. Their primary motive is not to teach, inform, or entertain because the visitors are not paying them for that service. Indeed, the visitors are not even the customers—the real customers are the advertisers who are purchasing eyeballs by the thousand.

Read it.

As the threat of major terror attacks rises, the European Commission has chosen to take action.  Of a sort.  It’s about to violate its existing antiterror agreement with the United States – and in a way that will make the current threat worse.

Tyler Cowen is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Ross Douthat considers the hoary question of which current practices we will someday condemn, linking also to Appiah, who raised it, and Will Wilkinson.  Prisons, factory farming, immigration barriers, and abortion are among the nominations.  I would suggest an alternate query, namely which practices currently considered to be outrageous will make a moral comeback in the court of public opinion?  Torture and loss of privacy — in some of its forms at least — already seem to be on the rise, at least in terms of their acceptability in the United States.

Read it.

Check it out.

Forward, Comrades, into a brave new world!

(AlGore, eat your heart out.)

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Ponder a war between China and Japan.

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Some good news for a change.

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There are 116,000 dead eligible voters in Massachusetts.  And in Florida, one major newspaper recently investigated and reported that almost 15,000 dead Floridians are still hanging around on the election rolls – just six weeks before one of the most vicious and important election cycles in our history.  Can it be the sun?  Most States have similar statistics.  Every two years, states must report to the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) information about the integrity and accuracy of their voter rolls.  The latest report is not good news for our democracy – or our international reputation.  South Dakota, Texas, Kentucky, Mississippi and Indiana report in excess of a dozen counties with more registered voters than breathing human beings old enough to vote.  West Virginia, Maryland, Iowa and North Carolina also reported having eligible deceased voters on their rolls.  The list goes on and on.  And so does the real risk that these voters will have illegal votes registered in their names.  Close races, like the Franken/Coleman race in Minnesota can be decided on just a handful of votes.  We may have to go to purple thumbprints at this rate.  Hugo Chavez must be howling at this American disgrace.

Read it.

The First World War will officially end on Sunday, 92 years after the guns fell silent, when Germany pays off the last chunk of reparations imposed on it by the Allies.

Well, I’m glad that’s over.

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Perhaps the realization that we’re a bunch of self-absorbed, narcissistic slackers. But that’s just a theory, you understand.

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A lesbian martial arts expert has staged a jailbreak to free her under age female lover from protective custody where she was being “cured” of her attraction to women, according to reports.

Police are investigating the escape of the 15-year-old girl, who allegedly admitted to having a sexual relationship with her 26-year-old taekwondo teacher in east Jakarta.

The girl, Tn, who comes from a community that only uses one name, left home to live with her teacher, Sj, for a month.

Soon to be a major motion picture, I have no doubt, perhaps starring Lindsay Lohan.

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Think of it as evolution in action.

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The US Navy’s plan to fit its next aircraft carrier with electromagnetic mass-driver catapults instead of steam launchers is reportedly on track, with shore trials using test weights a success. The progress of the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS), the first of its kind, is of interest to the Royal Navy as it could offer a way to massively cut the money spent on the Service’s two new carriers – or, more accurately, to cut the money spent on their aeroplanes.

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Rather an odd article to see in a computer magazine, but still worth checking out.

Not enough pictures, though.

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Well, that’s all right, then.

Read it.

Works for me.

Steve Sailer has a great deal of fun with this one.

Read it.

The 1968 Tet Offensive is remembered as a surprise attack by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces on symbolic targets in South Vietnam that turned American public opinion against the war and drove President Lyndon Johnson to the bargaining table. It is heralded as the turning point in the Vietnam War that ultimately led to the American withdrawal and victory of the communist forces.

For over forty years the myth of Tet has inspired America’s adversaries as a model for achieving low-cost strategic victories, and has provided American commentators with a shorthand means of conjuring the specter of inevitable U.S. defeat. Whenever terrorists or insurgents lash out in dramatic fashion, regardless of how swiftly they are crushed, the Tet analogy is sure to follow. Whether it was the fighting in Fallujah, scattered Taliban attacks in Kabul, or Wikileaks’ publication of 91,000 classified documents on the Afghan War, the American pundits’ Tet reflex hands the enemy a roadmap to a low-cost route to victory.

Tet provides a ready story line to journalists and terrorists alike; but the problem is that it is not true.

Read it.

The obvious implication is that black students are much more likely to be disruptive than white students. (Insert disquisition about dysfunctional ‘gangsta culture’ and that culture’s antipathy to ‘acting white’ here.)

Of course, the unspoken assumption of the writer (and, no doubt, his intended Crustian audience) is that there is some kind of dastardly racism going on there. It couldn’t possibly be that the students actually deserved the suspensions, oh no.

As Steve Sailer points out, you can’t parody this crap because it parodies itself.

Thomas Sowell:

Using words as vehicles to try to convey your meaning is very different from taking words so literally that the words use you and confuse you.

New York is the city with the oldest and strongest rent-control laws in the nation. San Francisco is second. But if you look at cities with the highest average rents, New York is first and San Francisco is second. Obviously, rent-control laws do not control rent.

If you check out the facts, instead of relying on words, you will discover that “gun control” laws do not control guns, the government’s “stimulus” spending does not stimulate the economy, and that many “compassionate” policies inflict cruel results, such as the destruction of the black family.

Read it.

Patrick Poole reports that a known Hamas operative and unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing trial in U.S. history – Kifah Mustapha – was recently escorted into the top-secret National Counterterrorism Center and other secure government facilities, including the FBI’s training center at Quantico, during a six-week “Citizen’s Academy” hosted by the FBI as part of its “outreach” to the Muslim Community. The group was accompanied by reporter Ben Bradley of WLS-Chicago (ABC), who filed a report on the trip yesterday.

Makes you wonder whose side our government is on. I’m getting the impression that it isn’t that of the American people.

Check it out.

In this artwork provided by Liquid Comics, the “Sliver Scorpion” is shown. The new superhero is a young Muslim, who loses his legs in a tragic landmine accident and must learn to come to terms with the reality of his disability while learning to use his newfound power to fight for social inclusion, equity and justice

No mention of the fact that a young Muslim with superpowers would almost inevitably turn into a super-terrorist — but, of course, that doesn’t fit the narrative. (Note that freedom, tolerance, and the rights of women aren’t on the program.)

Read it.

A journalist feels grumpy on Monday morning, and decides to phone it in.

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And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

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Rarely in our history have the rich been so unpopular with the public. Thus, it probably was inevitable that even their good deeds–namely philanthropy–would come under sharp criticism.

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A fascinating exposition of the ways and means of gerrymandering.

Unlike what seems to be the rest of the universe, I have no objection to gerrymandering. Drawing election districts so that a maximum number of like-thinking people are included together seems to me to be one of the most pro-democratic (however much it may be pro-Democratic) things one can do in a political system that, for better or worse, depends on representational elections.

I give no weight to the media hand-wringing about how it makes e.g. Congressional seats ‘less competitive’, since the self-interest of those who would have nothing to write about were there no electoral fistfights ought to be obvious to the most casual observer. If I like Congressman X, then putting me in a district of like-minded people to guarantee that Congressman X will win elections as long as he chooses to run suits me just fine. The point of representative democracy is to make sure that people’s views get represented, and there’s nothing inherent in the nature of geographic propinquity that has any relevance to that.

In fact, I would prefer an electoral system whereby a representative has exactly as much voting weight as the number of voters who have signed up to be represented by him (or her). I vastly prefer it to a system where my ‘representative’ may be someone whose positions I loathe merely because I happen to live in an area that contains more of his supporters than people who think like me. Talk about disfranchisement!

Read it.

Joel Kotkin is always worth reading.

What characterized great cities such as Amsterdam—and, later, places such as London, New York , Chicago, and Tokyo—was the size of their property-owning middle class. This was a class whose roots, for the most part, lay in the peasantry or artisan class, and later among industrial workers. Their ascension into the ranks of the bourgeoisie, petit or haute, epitomized the opportunities for social advancement created uniquely by cities.

In the twenty-first century—the first in which the majority of people will live in cities—this unique link between urbanism and upward mobility is under threat. Urban boosters still maintain that big cities remain unique centers for social uplift, but evidence suggests this is increasingly no longer the case.

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And the Nanny State of Britain forges ahead.

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The New York Times, premier Voice of the Crust, voices the angst of the Ruling Class over those silly proles not doing what they’re told by Big Nanny.

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

Read it.

Read it.

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

Eric S Raymond asymptotically approaches Christianity without realizing it.

One of the regulars at my Friday gaming group is a Greek Orthodox priest, but an educated and broadminded one with whom I get along surprisingly well considering my general opinion of Christianity. A chance remark he made one night caused me to recite at him the line from the 2010 portion of the Loginataka that goes “The way of the hacker is a posture of mind”, and then when he looked interested the whole four stanzas.

He laughed, and he got it, and then he articulated the reason that I write about being a hacker in this form so well that he made me think about things I hadn’t considered before and probably should have.

Orthodox priests tend to have that effect, yes.

The problem of how to induce valuable mental stances in human beings when explanation is insufficient is not a new one. All religions and mystical schools face it, and all have solved it in broadly similar ways. One way is direct mimesis: you imitate the behavior of an initiate rigorously, hope for the behavior to induce a mental state usefully like the initiate’s, and a surprising percentage of the time this actually works.

Well, duh. Christians call it prayer, and have been doing it for 2000 years.

The priest understood this immediately, even though he’s never written a line of code in his life. His branch of Greek Orthodoxy has a strong mystical tradition, and when I said “the way of the hacker is a posture of mind” his eyes widened.

Well, duh. Christians call it metanoia, and have been striving for it for 2000 years.

Keep on truckin’, ESR. You’ll be saved before you know it.

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Khanyisile Momoza, 29, was attacked as he harvested valuable perlemoen shells in the waters near Gansbaai in South Africa.

“It jumped out of the water with him and then it took him down.”

It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.

Read it.

Apparently, yes. Despite the fact that close to one-third of the country’s workforce is comprised of independent workers, this sizeable chunk of our economy has none of the protections and benefits that “traditional” employees have. Health insurance? No. Unemployment insurance? Nope. Protection from unpaid wages, or race, gender, or age discrimination? Not a chance. We’ve left these 42 million workers out to dry and entirely out of our social support system.

In other words, they aren’t chained to government like the rest of us. Lucky stiffs.

We’re dealing with an outdated employment system – it was built for a workforce from the 1930s, and it no longer works for us today. So as a result, a growing number of working Americans are left with no protections.

Fortunately, we have a government built for the 1930s, as well, so it’s not as bad as it could be — we don’t get all the ‘protections’ we pay for. Although the Obamanation is trying to change that.

And freelancers need to come together and recognize their power in numbers. This group of 42 million holds tremendous potential to influence politics (by demanding better legislation to protect them) and markets (by demanding affordable health insurance). However, without solidarity and a collective desire to create change, without raising their voices and demonstrating their immense economic contributions, independent workers will never be recognized as a “class” that is worth paying attention to. Employers also have a role in the solution. Some, like Time Inc., require that freelancers take a 4% hit on what they are owed if they want to be paid in 25 days, and others “misclassify” staff members as contractors in order to avoid paying their benefits.

Forward, comrades! We have nothing to lose but our chains!

Ponder the fact that somebody actually got paid for this piece of thumbsuckery.

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In thinking that you and I are one of Walter Alvarez’s “astronomically improbables,” it’s only a small mental step to realizing who else, specifically, had to be too.

Other names begin to crowd the head, in no particular order. Roosevelt. And Churchill. Tojo and Patton. Submit your own favorites to be grateful — or ungrateful — for.

Don’t laugh yet. Read it first.

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I’m glad someone besides me has noticed that.

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According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, consumers often quit using products that would be beneficial for them in the long run because they experience a short period of pessimism during their initial encounter with skill-based products as varied as knitting needles and mobile devices.