Read it.

The Turkish military has been, since Ataturk’s time, the bulwark keeping Turkey from turning into another ‘Islamic Republic’ like Iran. This represents the most serious attempt yet to break their power. There are a number of potentially very bad endings to this story.

Megan McArdle kicks over a rock.

Like most left-wing groups, this one is named for the things in which it is not engaged: It has nothing to do with science, nor is it in the public interest.

One shudders to consider that when Patrick Henry stood up in St. John’s Church and declared “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!”, he was offering to exchange his life for a freedom that would then be passed down people like this . . . people who would gleefully toss that freedom away with both hands if, by so doing, they might protect themselves from the harrowing predations of . . . a cheap plastic toy.

Exactly.

Monet Parham, by the way, seems to be an activist employed by the California government to advocate the ingestion of vegetables, though some pains seem to have been taken to obscure this connection.

As I’ve been saying (and the Lamestream Media haven’t) all along.

Read it.

“We’ll present a budget on Jan. 10. It will be a very tough budget, but it will be transparent,” he said. “We’ll lay it out as best I can. We’ve been living in fantasy land. It is much worse than I thought. I’m shocked.”

Uh, Jer, that’s your side what was doin’ it.

“This is really a huge challenge, unprecedented in my lifetime,” Brown told hundreds of educators, union representatives and parents who had gathered at UCLA. “I can’t promise you there won’t be more cuts, because there will be.”

Yeah, right.

These conditions, the budget session made clear, are likely to get worse. The state faces a $28-billion budget gap for the next 18 months, and roughly $20-billion deficits annually through the 2015-16 fiscal year. Non-university education accounts for roughly 40% of state spending, so cuts tend to significantly affect the state schools.

Looks like cuts, eh, Jer?

“The day of reckoning is upon us and I’m determined to bite the bullet, get it done in whatever way the consensus of California can be built,” he said. “Fair, transparent and enduring — that’s my goal.”

Educators responded by calling for an end to cuts, asking for greater discretion at the local level as to how dwindling dollars are spent, urging the state to seek more federal funding and requesting legislation that would allow them to increase local property taxes with 55% of the vote rather than the current requirement of two-thirds.

And there you have it — California heads toward the ditch, and the drivers are arguing over the seatcovers.

Read it.

I’m curious as to how they plan to enforce this. After all, these are organized bodies of criminals we’re talking about here.

This reminds me of the notion of California solving its budget deficit by taxing growers of marijuana — which is (last time I looked) illegal to start with.

Read it.

Don’t ever say we never have useful stuff here.

The advice is based on recent scientific analyses showing that a nuclear attack is much more survivable if you immediately shield yourself from the lethal radiation that follows a blast, a simple tactic seen as saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Even staying in a car, the studies show, would reduce casualties by more than 50 percent; hunkering down in a basement would be better by far.

Read it.

She looks pretty white to me. When I think of aborigines, I think of someone like this. Perhaps she’s a Magic Aborigine, like the Obamassiah is a Magic Negro.

Read it.

Perhaps they could hitch a ride with some of the thousands of Jews who are fleeing Swedish cities because of violence on the part of Muslims.

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A timely reminder that, while Russia is no longer a Communist dictatorship, it’s by no means a liberal republic.

Read it.

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

I do hate Brussels sprouts, though.

Read it.

The headline ought to read, ‘Leftist Activist Government Employee sues McDonald’s Over Happy Meals.’

Read it.

I don’t know which is more irritating: The fact that he had a wife, or the fact that anyone takes what she has to say seriously.

No, he wasn’t a ‘gentle giant’; gentle giants don’t try to shoot up a school board meeting.

Many people have problems with the economy, and many people’s wives lose their jobs; they don’t go and shoot up school board meetings. The guy was defective, and we’re rid of him. That’s all that needs to be said.

The Other McCain is, as you may imagine, having a great deal of fun with this one.

Read it.

Many liberals reacted to the erosion of their brand by changing labels. They became self-identified “progressives.” Although this was a shrewd move, it has been undermined by the large-scale unpopularity of the policies served up by progressives the first time (in modern history) that they governed under that label.

The alternative to re-labeling is de-labeling. And, though most progressives seem willing to stick with the progressive label for a while longer, some nervous nellies have concluded that resisting labels – and hoping that conservatives somehow will be shamed into following suit – will better serve their interests.

Read it.

Seventeen states banned phosphates from dishwasher detergents because the chemical compounds also pollute lakes, bays and streams. They create algae blooms and starve fish of oxygen.

Sandra Young was so mad that she called Procter & Gamble, which makes Cascade, to complain. But when she did, a company representative told her to be more careful about which pans she puts into her dishwasher.

“He said, ‘Well, if you’re really having that hard of a problem, maybe you should wash your dishes by hand.’ Which I thought was kind of strange for an automatic dishwashing company.”

Susan Baba from Procter & Gamble says the company had no choice. It just wasn’t feasible to make detergent with phosphates for some states and without them for others.

But not everyone is willing to adjust. Sandra Young figured out a way to undo the phosphate ban — at least in her own kitchen.

She bought some trisodium phosphate at a hardware store and started mixing her own formula.

“It seems to be working pretty good,” Young says.

Read it.

I wasn’t aware that Pashtuns weren’t white. Huh. You learn something new every day.

Ah, well. The wage of sin and all that.

Read it.

Remember Mystique impersonating the asshole Senator in the first X-Men movie.

Read it.

The bones of Cecil John Rhodes, the founder of Rhodesia, should be immediately exhumed and sent back to Britain as it is an affront to postcolonial sensibilities, according to a Zimbabwean politician.

Since the ‘postcolonial sensibilities’ displayed in modern Zimbabwe appear to consist of robbery, murder, and totalitarian oppression — much like pre-cololonial Zimbabwe — I imagine that Rhodes wouldn’t mind escaping the country as so many of his fellow Persons of European Ethnicity have done.

Check it out.

Read it.

A look into a geeked-out Brooklyn office reveals the beginnings of a product that every nerd in America would buy: a front door that unlocks when you check in.

Hall and his brother Erin Sparling, also a Web developer, installed the Foursquare door a couple of months ago as a way to let their handful of underlings enter the office. He took me through the door system and the rest of his uber-wired stuff, which include a home-built touch-screen media system, improvised satellite T1 connection, and a coffee table made of an Apple X-serve.

Read it.

This is from some outfit named Glassdoor.com, and I have no idea what qualifies them to issue these awards. Nevertheless, I am eager to embrace any external validation of the fact that my employer (whoever it may be) will never be on one of these lists.

Read it.

Money from a £60 million programme to prevent violent extremism should be targeted at individuals in danger of radicalisation – like the Stockholm bomber – instead of being used to fund community groups, according to the security minister Baroness Neville-Jones.

‘Security minister’? Yeah, that would really make me feel secure. ‘Give me money or I’ll become a radical!’ Gee, that’s worked so many times before.

Read it.

The Kitara discards old fashioned strings and has you strumming along on a multitouch display instead, populating the fretboard with a litany of buttons that modify the aural output from your digital input. It has an onboard synthesizer, but the real magic will happen once you plug it into your own audio equipment and start experimenting. Basically, it’s like the Kinect of electronic music….

We have the technology.

Read it.

Another example of the heavy hand of government destroying cultural institutions through a hypersensitivity to perceived benefit for the slaves consumers.

Of all the charges against street food vendors, the one that’s had the most staying power is cleanliness. If one views health in terms of code violations, a study has confirmed that many rules, from wearing gloves while preparing food to washing hands, are indeed broken routinely. But despite these rampant rule violations, the study’s authors concede that no hard data links eating street food to higher rates of illness than eating at home or in restaurants. And anyone who’s worked in the industry knows that even legal restaurants aren’t exactly paragons of rule-following, either. In fact, since street food vendors are not hidden from their customers by walls like restaurant cooks, consumers may actually have more information about cleanliness, and may be in a better position to pick food that lives up to their standards.

Aside from street food sold openly in busy city centers, another common category of low-cost food includes the many unlicensed, clandestine restaurants in America’s black urban ghettos. Around since at least the Great Migrations of blacks out of the South, these establishments sit at the margins of society, serving low-cost meals but kept from the light of day by zoning and health rules, compounded by a longstanding mistrust of government. Tyler Cowen has rightly noted how few restaurants one sees as one drives through neighborhoods southeast of the Anacostia River in Washington, DC, but women selling soul food out of their homes or in local meeting places like barbershops appear quite often in Off the Books, Sudhir Venkatesh’s ethnography of the underground urban economy.

Read it.

Dozens of asylum seekers are feared to have died after their boat was smashed against the rocks of Christmas Island in rough seas.

Recently, there have been reports of overcrowding at the centre and of detainees being forced to live in tents.

Earlier this year detainees staged a protest over the conditions, sewing their lips together and refusing to eat.

Sounds like a win-win.

What is this widespread assumption that if somebody likes Country A more than his home country, he has some sort of innate right to go to Country A?

Read it.

After all, who wouldn’t want a murderer delivering his mail?

I am not making this up.

Read it.

As high-flying lawyer Deidre Clark seeks £3.5 million in damages following her sacking after writing an erotic novel based on her experience as an expat in Moscow, Iain Hollingshead discovers that behaving badly is a prerequisite of working abroad.

There’s a career plan for you.

Read it.

President Barack Obama signed an executive order Tuesday establishing a White House Council for Community Solutions, with Jon Bon Jovi – Democratic troubadour and hair band hero – as a founding member.

Pissing away taxpayer money like this is why the country is so badly in debt.

Read it.

Wolverine is one of a number of comic book characters who is extremely difficult to kill. It has been theorized that it would take decapitation followed by immediate removal of his head from the vicinity of his body to effectively kill him. Similarly, though Superman has died, he can survive far, far more punishment than a standard homo sapiens sapiens.

Which raises the question: if it is impossible for a given action to kill a potential target, does it constitute a crime? And if so, which crime?

Read it.

Four young British Muslim extremists chanted religious slogans as they battered a prison officer. The gang chanted “death to the Kuffar” (non-believer) and “Allah Akbar” (God is Great) as they laid into the warder – who is in his 40s – after prayers.

Welcome to Lodonistan. Be sure to take your shoes off and wash your hands.

Megan McArdle is always worth reading.

Take the Endangered Species Act, which is supposed to protect species on private land.  But of course, if you find an endangered species, the thing to do is get rid of its habitat right away, because if anyone else finds your endangered species, you my substantially lose the use of your land.  If the government were paying for endangered species, on the other hand, people would be searching assiduously for snail darters and spotted owls.

If we only want things when we can stick other people with the bill, then we probably shouldn’t have most of those things.

The Other McCain is having entirely too much fun with the No Labels people.

Few things are more predictable than this: Whenever Republicans are on the upswing — whenever conservatives are on fire with enthusiasm, proclaiming their core principles and clearly on the winning side of important issues — the mainstream media will devote enormous coverage to an alleged groundswell of discontented moderates whose demands for “bipartisanship” and “civility” are accompanied by condemnation of “divisiveness” and complaints that “extremists” are ignoring the vast majority of independent “centrist” voters.

Let the reader note that we never heard any such complaints about “divisiveness” and “extremism” after Obama was elected and Democrats were ramming their partisan agenda through Congress.

The purpose of No Labels, of course, is to give the most irredeemably stupid “independent” voters an excuse to keep voting for Democrats. The mere fact that “No Labels” gets an 808-word free advertisement on the op-ed page of the Washington Post should tell you all you need to know about this alleged movement: It’s a ginned-up Establishment scam with no real activist constituency.

Jonah Goldberg is not fooled.

I’m deadly serious about how stupid and pernicious I think this whole thing is.

I think Stan Kurtz had it right. No Labels claims it wants to make it easier to talk about politics by making it more difficult for people it dislikes to talk about politics. It’s political correctness by a different name (and we all know how there are no labels in political correctness!).

I’ve been tuning in and out of the livecast of the NoLabelpalooza and it is so transparently obvious that this is a Trojan horse for a bunch of defeated liberal and moderate politicians to find some new rationale for their continued political relevance.

Some of the people involved in No Labels are very smart and very decent people who, as far as I can tell, have a deep patriotic love for America. What they seem to lack is sufficient respect for Americans and their ability to sort out these issues. They seem to think they are the Chosen People of politics with a unique insight into what is a legitimate point and what is an illegitimate one. They have contempt for the idea that there are sincere philosophical and political disagreements and so they try to belittle and dismiss those disagreements by waving them away as “labels” or name-calling (remember Barack Obama at the healthcare summit dismissing every inconvenient point as a “talking point”?).

Read it.

Now maybe they’ll quit whining and we can start working on diseases that affect everybody, like cancer.

Read it.

Towards the end of the 1970s, the Mother and Child Institute in Bogota, Colombia, was in deep trouble. The institute was the city’s obstetrical reference hospital, where most of the city’s poor women went to give birth. Nurses and doctors were in short supply. In the newly created neonatal intensive care unit, there were so few incubators that premature babies had to share them — sometimes three to an incubator. The crowded conditions spread infections, which are particularly dangerous for preemies. The death rate was high.

In Rey’s system, a mother of a preemie puts the baby on her exposed chest, dressed only in a diaper and sometimes a cap, in an upright or semi-upright position. The baby is strapped in by a scarf or other cloth sling supporting its bottom, and all but its head is covered by mom’s shirt. The mother keeps the baby like that, skin-to-skin, as much as possible, even sleeping in a reclining chair. Fathers and other relatives or friends can wear the baby as well to give the mother a break. Even very premature infants can go home with their families (with regular follow-up visits) once they are stable and their mothers are given training.

Read it.

Comic book supervillains, like real world criminals, often form groups and work together to advance their nefarious schemes.  The Legion of Doom, the Brotherhood of (Evil) Mutants, and the Evil League of Evil are examples of organized supervillain teams.  With organization comes a price, however.  Participating in these groups makes their members more vulnerable to criminal prosecution and civil claims under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO (there are also similar state laws).  But before discussing RICO and its applicability to supervillain teams, let’s first consider why other theories of criminal liability may not be the best fit.

Speech to the House of Commons 1841.

Can you imagine a modern Congressman making a speech like this?

Can you even think of one that wouldn’t need to have it explained to him in simpler words?

Read it.

Rejection stings, but it’s exactly what Shen wants. He’s on a self-imposed, self-improvement plan to get rejected by a different person every day for a month – a quest to get over his fear of rejection.

It’s all part of the 30-Day Rejection Therapy Challenge – a real-life game created in September by a Canadian Web designer with an anxiety disorder. And it has become a cult phenomenon as the idea spreads through Facebook, Twitter, the Hacker News blog and other social media.

Adherents in New York, Washington, San Francisco, Denmark and Hungary are documenting their denials on Facebook and Twitter. Followers can either buy a deck of cards on the rejectiontherapy.com website with suggested ways to get denied – Invite someone you’ve never socialized with out to dinner, ask someone their political affiliation – or players can come up with ideas on their own.

I’m waiting for the first suicide that can be traced to this game. But that’s me.

Read it.

In August a team of heavily armed Orange County, Florida, sheriff’s deputies raided several black- and Hispanic-owned barbershops in the Orlando area. There were more raids in September and October. According to the Orlando Sentinel, barbers and customers were held at gunpoint, some in handcuffs, while police turned the shops upside down. A total of nine shops were raided, and 37 people were arrested.

By all appearances, these raids were drug sweeps. Shop owners told the Sentinel police asked where they were hiding illegal drugs and weapons. But in the end, 34 of the 37 arrests were for “barbering without a licence,” a misdemeanor for which only three people have ever served jail time in Florida. Two arrests were for misdemeanor marijuana possession. Just one person was arrested on felony drug and weapon charges.

Read it.

Geez, seems as if I’ve been waiting forever for that damned thing to fall over….

Read it.

Thousands more children would eat lunches and dinners at school and all school food would become more nutritious under a bill President Barack Obama signed into law Monday, part of an administration-wide effort to combat childhood obesity.

I see vast herds of children wandering aimlessly through school looking in vain for storage. Apparently they were abandoned by their parents to fend for themselves — at taxpayer expense.

“At a very basic level, this act is about doing what’s right for our children,” Obama said before signing the bill.

No, doing what’s right for their children would be repealing the programs that encourage single motherhood, and perhaps reminding parents that they, not the taxpayer, are responsible for the children they generate.

“We can all agree that in the wealthiest nation on earth all children should have the basic nutrition they need to learn and grow and to pursue their dreams,” said Mrs. Obama. “Because in the end, nothing is more important than the health and well-being of our children. Nothing,”

Certainly not anything so trivial as property rights. Hey, Michelle, you have a lot more money than I do — how about YOU pay for all these kids? It’s your idea, after all.

Read it.

California’s budget crisis has highlighted one of the most important tax issues of our time: a growing dependence on wealthy taxpayers for government revenue.

In a column in yesterday’s Sacramento Bee, Dan Walters cited the need to reduce “the corrosive dependence on income taxes from a handful of wealthy people by broadening the tax base.”

Good luck with that.

In 2005, the richest 13.5% of California taxpayers (or those earning more than $100,000) paid 83% of all income taxes. Capital gains from the top 5% of taxpayers accounted for $100 billion out of the $111 billion in total capital gains reported.

No shit.

What governments need to do (aside from structural cost cuts, of course) is recognize the boom-and-bust nature of today’s wealthy and save money during the booms so they can spend during the busts. That way they can smooth out the inevitable tax swings.

Good luck with that, too.

Steve Sailer gets all the fun stuff.

Read it.

Can’t say that I blame him.

The surgeon’s actions, which are now under investigation, have triggered widespread debate in Germany over just where doctors can or cannot draw an ethical line.

Seems to me they ought to be able to draw it wherever they want to.

Read it.

The problem with ‘intellectual property’ is that everyone feels comfortable stealing it.

The essence of property is that it is EXCLUSIVE — if person A is using something, then nobody else can. So-called ‘intellectual property’ never has fit that description; no matter how many people have a copy of a book or musical recording, every single one of those people has an unimpaired ability to use it. This makes the whole ‘intellectual property’ scam untenable in the long term, and we’re watching it crumble and disintegrate in realtime.

Read it.

Congress: 535 people generously paid by taxpayers to stick their noses into everybody else’s business, coast to coast and around the world.

Read it.

Apparently there’s a program in Britain that pays kids to stay in school.

I’d love to get in on that….

Check it out.

I received this in an e-mail from my mother-in-law, attributed to Leslie Durham:

I do not like this, Uncle Sam,
I do not like the health care scam.
I do not like these dirty crooks,
or how they lie and cook the books.
I do not like when Congress steals,
I do not like their secret deals.
I do not like this speaker Nan,
I do not like this ‘YES, WE CAN’.
I do not like this spending spree —
I’m smart; I know that nothing’s free!
I do not like your smug replies,
when I complain about your lies.
I do not like this kind of “hope.”
I do not like it — nope, nope, nope!

Read it.

Of course — Fella and Ursula.

Read it.

Regular readers will remember a series of videos last year that showed Muslims blocking an entire street in Paris for their noonday prayers. The situation hasn’t changed in the interim: despite the fact that blocking off the streets for prayer is illegal, the area’s Muslims continue the practice with impunity.

Now: Think of the reaction if a Christian church were to block traffic with a religious procession.