Read it.

Now we have a case where a group is trying to rate games for an entire religious body. Kotaku, a video game blog in the Gawker network, posts this interesting tidbit about how a group in the Middle East has launched a ratings system for games based on the tenets of the Islamic faith.

Wonder what sort of rating they give scenarios where Marines are blowing away jihadists.

Peter Suderman ponders the implications.

As I noted yesterday, the authors of the recent health care overhaul legislation failed to include a severability clause in the text of the law. A severability clause is inserted into legislation in order to protect the bulk of the law should one provision be deemed unconstitutional. But as because the PPACA has no severability clause, a court—at least in theory—could take down the entire law if it decided that the mandate was unconstitutional.

Oops.

Mike Masnik is somewhat disgruntled.

With all of the new security procedures we keep hearing about, it’s important for the government to keep convincing us that we’re under a very real immediate threat that could put us at risk at any moment. Along those lines, you may have heard over the weekend about how the FBI supposedly stopped a terrorism bomb plot in Portland, Oregon. Except it appears more and more people are scratching beneath the surface and realizing that the entire plot appears to have been cooked up by the FBI itself. Yes, it sounds like they found a dumb kid who was willing to carry out a bombing. But there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that he actually had any ability to actually do so… until the FBI came along and provided him with all the details.

I have no problem with it. In fact, I have no problem with the concept of ‘entrapment’ in general.

There are two types of people in the world: Those who are willing voluntarily to comply the the social strictures necessary to preserve our society as a functioning system, and those who aren’t. When the latter actually Do Something (and that something varies from time to time and place to place), we call them criminals, and Do Something, typically unpleasant, in response. ‘You can’t cheat an honest man’, as they say, and you can’t entrap someone who isn’t already strongly inclined in that direction.

When it comes to terrorism, which by its nature involves covert and secretive activities, the case is less straightforward. Pace Bill Engval, potential terrorists don’t go around wearing a sign saying ‘Potential Terrorist’. It is, nevertheless, a socially useful thing — and, I suggest, a fruitful use of the resources of our public safety agencies — to identify such people before they have a chance to Make Trouble.

For better or worse, however, we can only do Bad Things to Bad People after they have taken a legally significant step on the road to Badness. It’s not good enough to say, ‘He’s a doofus, forget him’, because there’s no guarantee that he won’t (a) progress sufficiently beyond doofus in the future to emerge as a problem child, or (b) fall in with Evil Companions who might use him as a Useful Idiot on the road to a more competent Badness. Terrorism is like a sweater: When you pull on a loose end, you never know how far it will unravel; but you have to pull regardless, because you never know how far it will unravel.

I am therefore happy that this particular loose end has been tied up, and hope that eventually he will be locked up, and I look forward to many more in the future.

Read it.

TechCrunch is one of the better technical blogs, and they’ve assembled their “Greatest Hits” in a separate space. This link is to the pointer post. Highly recommended.

Read it.

Latin will undergo a revival in state schools under Coalition plans to put it on an equal footing with modern foreign languages.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

Mr. Obama is sending his Attorney General to Switzerland to lobby for the World Cup. Yes, apparently the most important job for the American Attorney General is to make sure we get a soccer tournament in 2022.

The Telegraph reviews his latest book.

Never one to keep his mouth shut, PJ O’Rourke’s knack for seeing the funny side of things has made him one of the world’s most controversial and celebrated humorists. His latest book is an attack on big government – but no subject is really safe from his wit.

Wow, there’s a shocker. By my count he’s written ‘an attack on big government’ at least six times now.

But, it wasn’t the taxes that turned him back into a true Republican. It was seeing his reflection in a shop window: “dirty jeans and a work shirt with mystic chick embroidery on it”. He dumped the Left because he didn’t like the threads. As a man suspicious of new ideas, it didn’t occur to him to separate the ideology from the outfits.

Hey, a man’s gotta have priorities.

Check it out.

A red-faced headteacher has apologised after a school report containing 14 spelling mistakes and grammatical errors was sent to a parent by a form tutor. Plain English campaigners slammed the error-laden email and said the teacher should be sent back to school herself. The school report errors are revealed just days after the government’s education secretary Michael Gove called for teachers to crackdown on poor spelling and grammar.

Apparently British teachers aren’t any better than American ones.

Read it.

… winds up speaking with an Irish accent….

Read it.

Ever since Willett, there have been two groups of people who are unhappy with the existing arrangement. Some would like to return to GMT, the country’s natural time zone, all year round – but they have never put forward legislation to this end and such a move is, in any case, no longer permitted under an EU directive.

Sounds like a good reason not to belong to the EU.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

The King’s Speech illustrates G. K. Chesterton’s 1905 insight that hereditary kingship is “in essence and sentiment democratic because it chooses from mankind at random. If it does not declare that every man may rule, it declares the next most democratic thing; it declares that any man may rule.” Colin Firth portrays that “anyman” as King George VI (reigned 1936-1952), father of the current queen, a man who was callously raised as the unimpressive spare to the glamorous heir, his older brother Edward VIII.

And Edward VIII was the Barack Obama of his day, a self-centered narcissist who just couldn’t understand why he couldn’t have everything his way. As result he quit when the going got tough, and stuck his brother with a thankless job for which he had no preparation and even less inclination, but in which he stepped up to the plate and hit a home run despite impressive odds.

Read it.

One can understand why the concept of American exceptionalism underwhelms Obama. As Tumulty notes (per Seymour Martin Lipset), the concept often has been invoked as an explanation for why the U.S. is the only industrialized country that does not have a significant socialist movement or Labor party. Much of Obama’s career, especially his many years as a community organizer, strongly suggests that he is less than comfortable with the fact that the U.S. is exceptional in this respect. No wonder he put the concept of American exceptionalism down when asked about it in France.

Read it.

It’s no wonder wind energy is so expensive; it’s not the cost of erecting the windmills, it’s the cost of hiring all the former government officials to get the windmills approved! The conclusion I reached about the Maine situation bears repeating in the Rhode Island case: If this were all being done by an oil company there’d probably be a much bigger uproar, but because it’s wind, it has an image as “clean” energy.

Eric Raymond is basically sound.

“The trouble with socialism,” Margaret Thatcher once famously said, “is that sooner or later you run out of other peoples’ money.” This observation is the key to understanding the wave of government bankruptcies that has already begun to break over us.

What’s actually happening here is that bond investors are catching wise about the largest political truth of the post-Cold-War era: government is bankrupt. It’s not just individual governments that are headed for financial collapse, but the entire model of ever-expanding statism that began with Otto von Bismarck’s Prussian state-pension system in the late 1800s.

Took ’em long enough.

Read it.

Some interesting thoughts on work and non-work.

The point is, crank-widget work is easy to define and measure in objective terms. Information work is different. Drucker offered the correct, but mostly useless idea that part of information work is defining the work to begin with, which makes it very ambiguous. Call it define-and-do work.

But when you are doing define-and-do Druckerian work, it is basically impossible to decouple definition from execution a priori in useful ways (“my job is to define my job and do it” — sounds like a GNU recursive acronym, doesn’t it?). “Work” is whatever the hell you need to do to “get the job done.” A non-constructive definition.

By the same standard, you sometimes need a  vacation to recover from a vacation if the original vacation involved meeting family expectations. I am sure that’s especially true for many Americans who are returning after stressful family weekends. That’s a “work” vacation because between the turkey and the pumpkin pie, you may have had to justify your career/life to your Dad, and the reaction mattered. If this is true for you, then for better or worse, your Dad is your customer for a product you are creating called “my life.”

Power Line does a recap.

Actually, we probably spend less time talking about Sarah Palin than almost any political web site–a fact of which I am rather proud. But, for those who need a daily Sarah fix, here it is.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Probably the most striking thing about last week’s student demo against the Lib-Con government’s cuts and tuition fees agenda was not the protest itself – which, like all youth protests, was loud, bracing and had some good points as well as bad ones – but rather the sad-dad effect. It was the way in which university lecturers, teachers, journalists and middle-class parents – the respectable adult world – gave a vigorous nod of approval to the demonstration, fantasising that it was some kind of genetic or educational extension of their own inner youthful radicalism….I remember when it was considered embarrassing if your mum phoned a mate’s house to check if you were okay during a sleepover. But to phone the cops to find out, in the words of one demo-approving dad, ‘when our children will be home’? That’s the death-knell of radicalism right there.

Kind of like the Institutional Revolutionary Party in Mexico. ‘Sure, we’ve got a permanent revolution here. Be sure to fill out the forms.’

I suppose it would be too cruel if we were to laugh….

Read it.

Over 60,000 people have been hit in the past few hours on Facebook by a scam which claims that after installing an app called ePrivacy you can see who checked your profile. Needless to say the app does not work. Instead it just lets the scammer access your profile and post “OMG OMG OMG… I cant believe this actually works!” to your wall, with a link to the app, thus spreading it further.

Yet another excellent reason to avoid Facebook.

Read it.

The troubled “Hobbit” film project has become mired in a race row after reports that a British woman of Pakistani heritage was told she was not white enough to take part as an extra.

This is not a matter of ‘race’ (what ‘race’ are Pakistanis?), but one of ‘color’ (for which ‘race’ is the politically fashionable surrogate), and this requirement is directly related to the job. Next they’ll be demanding that Othello be played by a lesbian Latino in order to promote ‘diversity’.

She has started a Facebook group called “Hire Hobbits of all colours! Say no to Hobbit racism!”

What an idiot. She ought to be disallowed because hobbits aren’t as shit-stupid as she appears to be.

And 5′ is not ‘the perfect height to play one of Tolkein’s hobbits’; the perfect height to play one of Tolkein’s hobbits is 3′, which any ass who had read the books would know. It’s common these days for journalists to write about stuff concerning which they are grossly ignorant, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to put up with it.

Read it.

The need for embryonic stem cells recedes in importance faster and faster.

Power Line looks at the SWPL phenomenon.

But is this group an elite? There’s a place where one can reasonably aspire to be part of the elite based on taste in TV shows, books, and recreational activites. That place is high school (or maybe middle school). In the adult world, elite status depends mainly on the money one accumulates, the things one accomplishes, and the power one exercises.

Read it.

Like no other holy book among the world religions, the Quran contains an abundance of contradictory expressions. What is forbidden in one place is expressly demanded in another, and vice versa. However, the contradictory quality of the Quran is only an apparent one. It falls apart abruptly when one recognizes the very carefully protected secret hidden within the architecture of the Quran. For the Quranic Suras (chapters) are not arranged chronologically, but rather according to their length — and the newer Suras (from Muhammad’s violent later phase when he was in Medina) override the older ones from his era in Mecca that were comparatively more peaceful. However, this secret is guarded by Islamic scholars very closely as if it were a holy grail — and is aired only on particular occasions.

What you don’t know can kill you … and your family.

Read it.

That’s security, of a sort.

Read it.

The U.S. Embassy takeover in Tehran on November 4, 1979, was the start of 444 days which came to define Jimmy Carter.  The U.S. government was revealed to be powerless and the President weak.  Those among us who were alive and conscious during those days have embedded the feelings of helplessness.

There have been many comparisons of Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter, focused on the economy.  But the continuing leak of documents by Wikileaks has become for Obama what the Iranian hostage crisis was to Carter.

The Wikileaks folks trot the globe with impunity and funnel documents to the press at will, for the purpose of damaging U.S. relations with other countries, our war efforts, and our intelligence capability.  And we do almost nothing about it.

Read it.

If the Swiss can do it, why can’t we?

Read it.

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

Wonder whether we could slip Assange’s name in the list of Afghan informers. Kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.

I also love the oxymoronic term ‘Taliban courts’.

Read it.

But the latest theory suggests that the great navigator, who died in 1506 after four voyages to the New World, was in fact of royal blood: the son of King Vladislav III who was supposedly slain in the Battle of Varna in 1444.

In his third book on the subject Manuel Rosa, who has spent 20 years researching the life of Columbus, suggests that Vladislav III survived the battle with the Ottomans, fled to live in exile on the island of Madeira where he was known as “Henry the German” and married a Portuguese noblewoman.

Mr Rosa believes a conspiracy was agreed to hide Columbus’ true origins and to protect the identity of his father. “The courts of Europe knew who he was and kept his secret for their own reasons,” the researcher at Duke University, North Carolina said.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

I think it’s a variant on the Polish Joke, personally.

Read it.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

But the Voices of the Crust are standing by to carry on its anti-American struggle.

El Pais, Le Monde, Speigel, Guardian & NYT will publish many US embassy cables tonight, even if WikiLeaks goes down.

Ah, yes, the Usual Suspects. What would we do without them? Perhaps win the war against terrorism, or something disgusting like that.

Read it.

Mohamud is 19 years old. He is a native of Mogadishu, Somalia. He is a naturalized American citizen. He is a Muslim. When apprehended by law enforcement authorities he declared, “Allahu Akhbar.” The motivation for Mohamud’s act of attempted mass murder was “violent jihad.”

My prediction: Not much. Those who are willing to face reality know what they need to know already. Those who are living in their multi-culti fantasyland know too much that ain’t so for this to make any dent in their invincible ignorance. And so it goes.

Cringely takes a look from 10,000 feet.

What’s happening to e-mail is complex but comes down to changing contexts and competing media. Back in 1992 communication for me meant e-mail (which at that time for me was cc:mail, MCI Mail, and Internet mail), snail mail, Usenet newsgroups, bulletin board systems like The WELL, telephone, and fax. Today the mix has changed almost completely and I have Internet mail, snail mail, SMS, various chat systems (Skype, iChat, ICQ, etc.), twitter, Facebook and other social networks, and the big one for me — WordPress. BBS’s are gone as are proprietary e-mail systems, my fax machine was thrown-away long ago and Usenet has been subsumed into the Internet as a whole.

Then spam spoiled it all. I hate spam. I feel betrayed by spam and the spam industry. Remember those proposals to put an ISP postage charge on e-mails to eliminate spam? Those proposals failed because it looked too much like a restriction of speech or a violation of net neutrality, but I wish it had worked. I’d gladly pay a couple bucks per month to be truly spam-free.

Facebook has brought for non-professional writers in us the same e-mail effect I saw when I jumped to WordPress: every wall or chat posting makes unnecessary at least one e-mail, maybe several.

Read it.

They wanted me to go to jihad, but I said no, no, no….

Three backpack-clad technicians, standing out of the line of fire, operate the three robots with wireless video-game-style controllers. One swivels the video camera on the armed robot until it spots a sniper on a rooftop. The machine gun pirouettes, points and fires in two rapid bursts. Had the bullets been real, the target would have been destroyed.

No, ‘killed’. The target — a sniper — would have been ‘killed’. C’mon, New York Times, use the word. I dare you.

Because robots can stage attacks with little immediate risk to the people who operate them, opponents say that robot warriors lower the barriers to warfare, potentially making nations more trigger-happy and leading to a new technological arms race.

“Wars will be started very easily and with minimal costs” as automation increases, predicted Wendell Wallach, a scholar at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and chairman of its technology and ethics study group.

Gee, isn’t that what jihadists are doing right now? Except that they aren’t part of the Blame America First crowd, which I suspect Wendell Wallach is.

Civilians will be at greater risk, people in Mr. Wallach’s camp argue, because of the challenges in distinguishing between fighters and innocent bystanders. That job is maddeningly difficult for human beings on the ground. It only becomes more difficult when a device is remotely operated.

No, it will be easier, because a commander won’t be hesitating to do the right thing because of the prospect of some bleeding-heart Cincy Sheehan back home raising a stink because her widdle babykins got killed doing his duty.

Yet the shift to automated warfare may offer only a fleeting strategic advantage to the United States. Fifty-six nations are now developing robotic weapons, said Ron Arkin, a Georgia Institute of Technology roboticist and a government-financed researcher who has argued that it is possible to design “ethical” robots that conform to the laws of war and the military rules of escalation.

But it’s not ‘nations’ that are the problem; it’s two-bit terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and the Taliban, who one doubts are spending a lot of their R&D dinars on robot fighting vehicles.

“If the decisions are being made by a human being who has eyes on the target, whether he is sitting in a tank or miles away, the main safeguard is still there,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch, which tracks war crimes. “What happens when you automate the decision? Proponents are saying that their systems are win-win, but that doesn’t reassure me.”

Hate to break it to you, Tom, but your reassurance isn’t a high priority with the people who actually have to face the murderous swine of the world. (I love that: ‘… Human Rights Watch, which tracks war crimes’ — but only when they aren’t committed by Muslims. You Can Look It Up.)

Bryan Caplan takes a poke at the hornet’s nest.

Eisner dwells on the Protocols‘ zombie-like ability to survive despite repeated conclusive disproof.  To me, of course, that’s not surprising at all.  Countless religious and political texts remain sacred to true believers despite conclusive proof of their historical inaccuracies.

Can you say ‘Book of Mormon’? Of course you can. But you won’t, because that would be impugning someone’s religion. If we’re going to impugn religion, let’s pick the low-hanging fruit … like, oh, say, Islam.

Read it.

An outfit called Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength has drawn the attention of the Wall Street Journal with a letter calling for a tax increase on those earning more than $1 million a year.

The Journal reporter asked a couple of the “patriotic millionaires” why they don’t just send in voluntary checks to the Treasury rather than trying to raise everyone’s taxes. One of them, Dennis Mehiel, responded, “Let’s carry this voluntary taxation argument to its conclusion. We already have a country like that, it’s called Greece. No one pays taxes in Greece. We’ve had a progressive income tax in the U.S. for decades and during that time we had a growing middle class and increased affluence and increase consumption. To say we should just write our own checks is a spurious argument. It’s catchy. But it has no validity in a substantial dialogue about public policy.”

But the American millionaires are not like Greeks who don’t pay taxes. In fact in 2007 the top 1% of taxpayers paid more than 40% of the federal income taxes, more than are paid by the bottom 95%. In 2008, the top 1 percent of tax returns paid 38.0 percent of all federal individual income taxes and earned 20.0 percent of adjusted gross income.

So either there’s something else going on here, or millionaires can be as stupid as anybody else. Which it is, is left as an exercise for the reader.

Mr. Mehiel ran for lieutenant governor of New York in 2002 and lost after a campaign full of mud-slinging.

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

There’s a certain asymmetry in this debate. The “Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength” get attention from the press, probably get invited to testify on Capitol Hill, see their names in the company of other famous and widely lauded people, and seem selfless. If some millionaires against tax increases were to start an organization called Patriotic Millionaires Against Coercion and Socialism, they’d get attacked as selfish, even though they’re not the ones trying to force their own values on others. The Patriotic Millionaires Against Coercion and Socialism, if they ever got started, would argue that they’d rather exchange the money voluntarily with their employees, their shareholders, their customers, or their charities than have it taken by force by the government.

‘Asymmetry’. What an anodyne name for it. I think the technical term in German is ‘einbahnstrasse’.

Read it.

My theory is, that teachers typically come from the left side of the Bell Curve, and smart kids make them feel inferior and threatened. I’ve run across more than a few of those in my time.

And, of course, there’s the Keillor Syndrom: Modern ‘progressives’ are committed to the worldview in which ‘the children are all above average’, so to single some out as ‘gifted’ constitutes DISCRIMINATION of an particularly invidious kind.

The standard, “one-size-fits-all” philosophy of public education has always troubled me.

And rightly so. This is the classic ‘factory school’ in which batch-processed kids are passed along the assembly line like so many cartons of eggs, based on the theory that kids of roughly the same age will have roughly the same cranial abilities — a notion that’s laughable on its face … except that everybody forgets to laugh.

The Globe Life polls on Gifted Education ( Nov. 11 and Nov. 15, 2010) were totally contradictory.  After a story on the social costs to kids of “Gifted” programs, some 56% of the 2,284 respondents opposed “segregation” of gifted kids.  Yet, if given the option, most parents would put their kids in such programs anyway. When asked “Would you put your child in a gifted program?,” some 73% of the 765 respondents replied in the affirmative.

Not really contradictory. When people are asked about airy generalities, they provide the socially-acceptable response. When it comes to their own interests, however, it’s All About Me. This is why rich people who are strident in their calls for ‘increasing taxes on the rich’ don’t send all their Extra Money to the government voluntarily.

Stepping back with a wider lens, highly motivated, academically inclined students look a lot different. Seeking more from your local public school and demanding better can be difficult –and can be easily dismissed as reflecting the “elitist” attitude of the privileged classes.

And we see this in Politically Correct California, where left-wing Crustian parents loudly denounce segregation and the Oppression Of People Of Color and then fight tooth and nail to keep their own kids out of schools that have any substantial number of black or latino kids.

Read it.

Politics leads to really bizarre behavior.

Not sure how I forgot to include this since it was the whole reason I chose to post it, but the affordable housing is mandated by local inclusionary zoning – no developer would voluntarily seek out below-market rents. So essentially the developer was forced to include “affordable” units, which then became the very reason that the community rejected the proposal.

So developers are required by law to include ‘affordable housing’ (i.e. housing cheap enough for the Underclass in this Crustian neighborhood) and then the NIMBYs oppose the development because it would bring masses of Underclass to their community. The profit potential of real estate development must be truly immense if developers are willing to put up with this horseshit.

Power Line is on the case.

Ottmar Edenhofer is one of the leaders of the international global warming movement: he is the deputy director and chief economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the joint chair of the IPCC’s Working Group 3, and will co-chair the Working Group “Mitigation of Climate Change” at the upcoming summit in Cancun. On November 14, he was interviewed by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. His explanation of the current goals of the climate change movement was illuminating:

“First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.”

And there you have it. Straight from the horse’s ass.

George Will is always worth reading.

In 1954, Fredric Wertham brought science – very loosely defined – to the subject of juvenile crime. Formerly chief resident in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, he was politically progressive: When he opened a clinic in Harlem, he named it for Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law who translated portions of “Das Kapital” into French, thereby facilitating the derangement of Parisian intellectuals.

Without ever interviewing the convicted spy Ethel Rosenberg, Wertham testified on her behalf concerning what he called her “prison psychoses.” Since 1948, he had been campaigning against comic books, and his 1954 book, “Seduction of the Innocent,” which was praised by the progressive sociologist C. Wright Mills, became a bestseller by postulating a causal connection between comic books and the desensitization of young criminals: “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry.”

Wertham was especially alarmed about the one-third of comic books that were horror comics, but his disapproval was capacious: Superman, who gave short shrift to due process in his crime-fighting, was a crypto-fascist. As for Batman and Robin, the “homoerotic tendencies” were patent.

Green Arrow was the guy I always worried about. At least Hawkman was demonstrably heterosexual, although who knows what they got up to in the Polaris system?

Progressivism is a faith-based program. The progressives’ agenda for improving everyone else varies but invariably involves the cult of expertise – an unflagging faith in the application of science to social reform. Progressivism’s itch to perfect people by perfecting the social environment can produce an interesting phenomenon – the Pecksniffian progressive.

I’m more concerned about the Pickwickian progressives, myself.

Read it.

The problem with unions is that they’re run by people who have all the foresight of a cave fish. They’ll always take a dollar today even when it will cost them (and everyone else) ten tomorrow.

Read it.

Wouldn’t mind having one of these.

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It’s not a phobia when they really are out to get you.

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A Texas businessman has agreed to pay $15 million to settle federal allegations that he and his company cheated the government by selling old and potentially dangerous food to the U.S. military to supply combat troops serving in Iraq and elsewhere.

Yeah, ‘Samir Mahmoud Itani’ sure says ‘Texas businessman’ to me, straight up.

As the U.S. military presence grew in the Middle East, Itani’s business boomed. American Grocers shipped so much stale merchandise that the company bought paint solvent by the barrel and set up assembly lines to wipe out the old labels to make room for the phony dates, according to the complaint.

One might ask why the Defense Department was buying food from a foreigner in the first place. Oh, wait, we’re not supposed to notice that — or the fact that he’s undoubtedly a Muslim, and maybe, just maybe, was trying to interfere with the war effort. Nothing to see here, move along, move along….

Read it.

William Fox of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and John Vesecky, his colleague at UC Santa Cruz, are working on a modified radar gun that can identify suicide bombs worn under the clothing. To do this, they cataloged the most common arrangements of looped wires used to construct “suicide vests,” and developed software that can identify the radar cross-section of each. So far, results have been pretty good: according to New Scientist, “telltale factors in the polarisation of the reflected signals” allowed them to correctly identify volunteers dressed as bombers up to ten meters away, roughly eighty-five percent of the time.

Not sure how much good that will do, since the typical blast radius of a suicide bomber’s vest is rather more than ten meters, but I suppose it’s the thought that counts.

Read it.

“Well, to start out with, we were stupid.” No, they didn’t actually say that — it would have been honest, and honesty is to be avoided when the story is how much of a victim you are.

Memorandum: If you do something stupid, and bad things happen to you as a result, you’re not a victim, you’re an idiot.

Read it.

Anyway, for no reason I can recollect, I didn’t change my watch on the captain’s say-so on the way back into Gatwick, so I am still living sporadically on British Summer Time. Obviously, I sit in front of a computer for much of the day, so every passing second goes by digitally in the right-hand corner of my screen. (Annoyingly, that’s my good eye as well.) But I don’t clockwatch if I’m working in the garden or walking the dog through the woods and fields. And there’s nothing to tell me that my watch is wrong when I do look at it because the time it tells is matched by the quantity of daylight. Ten past five by my watch: ooh, better get a move on, dog, or it’ll be pitch-black-dark in the bluebell wood by Cowhouse Farm. And by the time we’ve got in and hauled wellies off and switched off the kitchen lights, the black windows make an appropriate end-of-the-day darkening. Six o’clock or thereabouts, hmm, time to think about what to cook for dinner.

Preach it, sister. I don’t care which one they pick, they just need to PICK ONE AND KEEP IT.

Read it.

You just know it’s bound to happen, especially after an election season as heated as this one was. That Republican relative we all have is going to show up at Thanksgiving and start parroting lies about Democrats that he heard on Fox News or from one of those shadow group attack ads he saw on TV during the campaign.

That’s why we’re proud to bring back the DCCC’s Thanksgiving Cheat Sheet. The Cheat Sheet will arm you with the real facts so you can answer back with the truth as soon as your Republican relatives start sounding like Sarah Palin.

Read it.

Thoughts worth pondering.

It is rarely noticed, for instance, how much the Preamble shares, in terms of both form and content, with earlier documents in American political history — documents, even (somewhat awkwardly for our anti-Preamblists), which go no further than doing what the Preamble does. That is to say: casting an eye across the centuries of political arrangement in North America, it is something of a puzzle to discover several documents of high importance, which appear to anticipate in framework and substance, the political work done later in the Preamble — at least, it is something of a puzzle if we accept the “throat-clearing” doctrine of the anti-Preamblists. It seems that at certain crucial moments, when our ancestors were bent over the problems of constituting political structures for themselves, they produced documents that accomplished little more than a good clearing of the throat.

Read it.

7. Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.

9. Support bacteria. They’re the only culture most people have.

11. Change is inevitable, except from vending machines.

13. How many of you believe in psycho-kinesis? Raise my hand.

Read it.

What environmentalists fail to grasp is that fossil fuels are buried treasure, and that treasure is not going to stay in the ground: someone’s going to dig it up. Government regulators may try to prevent that, but when you’re talking about billions of dollars (and the tax revenue that generates), people will find a way.

This is an eternal blind spot for environmentalists: people respond to incentives, and they won’t necessarily respond to regulations in the way that regulators think they will. That’s how the Endangered Species Act led landowners to destroy habitat to prevent the government from making their land worthless. That’s how incentives for electric cars wound up creating free golf cart sales to the well-off. That’s how subsidies for new efficient refrigerators led to more people having two fridges instead of one. That’s how helping to create the corn ethanol lobby (originally as a gasoline additive to address summertime carbon monoxide emissions) has led to an entrenched rent-seeking industry that engages in massive environmental despoliation. And now, once again, environmentalist actions lead to more, not less environmental damage. Will they never learn?

Read it.

Surprisingly enough, not by Mencius Moldbug.

The sweetest wine quaffed from the cup of bliss comes mingled with a bitter draft of sorrow (alas, alack). Tragically—tragically—we can remove one politician only by replacing him or her with another. And then, of course, our choices are excruciatingly circumscribed, since the whole process is dominated by two large and self-interested political conglomerates that are far better at gaining power than at exercising it wisely.