Read it.

Yeah, that U.N. really helps.

Megan McArdle runs the numbers on the tax deal and concludes that Democrats won more than they lost.

With the wailing and gnashing of teeth from many progressives, you would think that Obama had cut a tax deal to eliminate tax breaks on the wealthy in exchange for freeze-drying Guatamalan orphans in order to use them as decorations on the Family Research Council’s Christmas Tree.  Meanwhile, the conservatives I’ve seen are as proud of this deal as if they’d baked it from scratch.

I’m puzzled on both counts.  Let me get the personal stuff out of the way: I think this is a terrible deal.  I was rooting for gridlock to cause the tax cuts to expire entirely, which would probably have a moderately negative impact on the economy, but would at least somewhat forestall a devastating fiscal crisis down the road.  If it was politically necessary to do tax cuts, I wanted them to be as small as possible, not $900 billion over two years.

Read it.

A struggle inside the House ethics committee could spill out into the open later today when Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.), the subject of an ongoing investigation, calls for an official probe into the indefinite suspension of two people investigating her.

Read it.

Read it.

In a four-page e-mail, a terrorist group that calls itself the Indian Mujaheddin took responsibility for the blast, writing that the bombing was in retaliation for a September court ruling that divided the Babri Masjid holy site between Muslims and Hindus.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Remember it.

Read it.

Perhaps they need to make the acquaintance of the Wicker Man.

Erick Erickson plays the cynic very well.

There are two immutable laws of Washington, D.C. To understand the tax compromise in the Senate, you must know the laws.

1. Politicians in leadership believe that if they make both the left and right angry they must have done something right; and,
2. If Democrats and Republicans come together in a compromise — no matter how bad that compromise may be — the media will herald the compromise and inevitably use the word “tone” in discussing it.

Then there is a corollary to the two rules: people who want a seat at the table with the politicians and media will turn into sycophants and tell you how delicious the compromise tastes.

Read it.

Syria continued selling missiles to Hizbollah, the Lebanese militant group, after expressly promising the US it was not doing so, diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks disclose.

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

Unlike Christianity and Judaism, Islam has no stricture against lying, especially to non-Muslims. You’d think the idiots who run our governments would have cottoned to that by now.

Freeberg captures the whole program of the Crust in a few pithy words.

Doing crimes, doing time: The people who fuck around shouldn’t have to pay any penalty, and the people who help other people shouldn’t benefit.

Earning money: The people who fuck around shouldn’t have to pay any penalty, and the people who help other people shouldn’t benefit.

Paying taxes: The people who fuck around shouldn’t have to pay any penalty, and the people who help other people shouldn’t benefit.

And that sums up the ‘progressive’ agenda very nicely.

Read it.

Or you could just open the fargin door yourself.

Read it.

She wrestled with accepting a smaller settlement than she considered fair. Then a lawyer referred her to Balance Point Divorce Funding, a new Beverly Hills lender that offers to cover the cost of breaking up — paying a lawyer, searching for hidden assets, maintaining a lifestyle — in exchange for a share of the winnings.

In October, Balance Point agreed to invest more than $200,000 in Ms. Pont’s case.

“It’s given me hope,” Ms. Pont said. “I don’t view it as a loan; I view it as an investment in my future. They are helping me to get what is rightfully mine.”

Freeberg spanks Trunk in an interesting way.

One of the major problems in the world is people who are so fanatical about tolerance and diversity that they seem congenitally incapable of MINDING THEIR OWN BUSINESS. Penelope Trunk is one such. Freeberg refuses to let her get away with it.

It all comes down to this — if your productivity & cheerful demeanor slip a notch or two because you were just reminded someone has a different belief from yours, then you are the problem. Just like the wedding guest who says “I’m not coming if X is coming” is the problem.

Indeed. Judging by her discussion, Trunk is Jewish; her whole tirade is just “What about me?” writ large, which matches her other writings: It’s the world’s job to bend itself to fit her interests and objectives (and personal peculiarities, of which there are many), and if it doesn’t, well, then, the world had better get with the program. And she completely misses what Christmas (among other social institutions) is all about.

You know what I hear when someone says “Merry Christmas”? Lots of things, chief among them the very same thing I hear when someone says “Welcome to Hooters sir!” I know I’m someplace where there aren’t any tightasses. I hear “Come, let us break bread together because we’re all here together, we’re all brothers and sisters; maybe we have some long-simmering dispute, but if we do, we’ll pick it up in January. Have a seat at our table, and leave your troubles on the doorstep!”

And you can’t say any better than that.

Read it.

The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial “Copenhagen accord”, the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.

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

It’s bad enough that the U.S. government is using junk science to destroy the American economy; nothing will do, apparently, except that the rest of the world has to be screwed as well.

Read it.

Read it.

While in Spain last month, I found that some Spaniards have invented a new plural form. When writing about a mixed group of boys and girls, they write chic@s.   Pretty clever, in my estimation. Except for the problem of auto-correct trying to convert the word into an e-mail address. The new letter “@” is not yet part of formal usage. I read a variety of newspapers, and never saw the @ used as a letter. But on the Madrid subway, some cars have slim TV monitors attached to the center poles, and those televisions show short news items and commercials, along with captioning. On one news report, I did see the “@” used in the captioning for a mixed-gender plural.

Todd Zywicki has some good points.

Justice Scalia notes (in a Matter of Interpretation if I recall correctly) that what is striking about the 19th Amendment is how quaint it seems that in order to give women the right to vote it was thought that you actually had to amend the Constitution in order to bring that result about.  Today, of course, someone would just file a lawsuit and have the judges order that result.

Read it.

For 16 years, car immobilisers have kept car thieves at bay – but that may now be changing.

A device fitted within the key fob of a modern car broadcasts an encrypted radio signal to the car as the driver starts the vehicle. If the signal is recognised by the car’s receiver, it responds by sending an encrypted signal to the engine control unit (ECU), which allows the car to start. If the driver tries using the incorrect car key fob, the ECU locks down the engine.

But the proprietary encryption keys used to transmit data between the key fob, receiver and engine are so poorly implemented on some cars (see “Castles built on sand”) that they are readily cracked, Nohl told the Embedded Security in Cars conference, in Bremen, Germany, last month.

Read it.

In 2008 (the latest year for which accurate data are available), the bottom 95 percent of income-earning households in the U.S. – a group that surely includes “middle-income taxpayers” – paid 41 percent of the revenue taken in by Uncle Sam from the personal income tax, while the top 5 percent of income-earning households paid 59 percent of this tax revenue.  And looking only at the top 1 percent of income-earning households – surely “the wealthy” – they paid a whopping 38 percent of federal personal income tax revenue.

In 2008, for the typical household in the top one-percent of income-earning households in America, the percent of its adjusted gross income that it paid in federal income taxes was 23.27.  Middle-income households paid less.  For households whose earnings put them in the top 50 percent, but below the top 25 percent, of income earners, the percent of their adjusted gross income paid in income taxes was, on average, 6.75.  For households in the bottom 50 percent of income-earners, the percent of their adjusted gross income paid in income taxes was, on average, 2.59.

Yeah, those ‘rich people’ are sure getting away with highway robbery, aren’t they?

Read it.

Far be it from me to say good about anything connected with Harvard, but this interview has a lot of meat to it. I especially like Norquist’s take on the ‘rich people for higher taxes’ snowjob:

I’m all in favor of, you know, rich people wanting to contribute money to somebody else. One of the things that’s interesting is none of the rich liberals actually believes in government. Warren Buffett, who says he’s a big liberal who liked Obama, he has millions of dollars. If he thought any of the United States government spent money better than he does, he could make a contribution to the federal government. And he never does. He gives all his money to private charities, because he thinks he can spend his money better than the government can, but he wants everybody else to have higher taxes because he thinks the government can spend your money better than you can. This is not an endorsement of government. It’s an expression of contempt for you.

Read it.

They’ve been caught time and time again using the poor and homeless to do the jobs their own members won’t do for themselves. The Carpenters’ union has a history of hiring the homeless to march around in circles, chanting for union wages, benefits and pensions, things they don’t receive from the union.

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

Megan McArdle kicks over a rock.

The source said it’s very common for someone with seniority to bid on escalators they know to be well maintained so they can slide and and not do anything for the six months it’s under their “care.”

“They can coast for a while,” the source said. “Then when problems start, they can move on,” leaving an ailing escalator under the supervision of someone with less experience.

This way of doing things, the source said, “destroys the incentive” of the younger workers who know that if they do a good job, their escalators will be taken away by someone with more seniority.

“There’s a culture in which you don’t really have to perform to keep your job,” they said.

It’s not always possible to foresee this sort of thing–I’m sure this scheme didn’t sound crazy when it was proposed.  But clearly, it was a terrible idea that needs to be fixed.  Unfortunately, when you’re in a collective bargaining situation–especially a government agency collective bargaining situation–it’s really, really difficult to change the bad rules.  Workers will by now have come to see this as a perk of the job, and view any change to the system as a material loss for which they should be richly compensated.

Read it.

I love online books.

The Other McCain fill you in.

“Inequality” is not a synonym for injustice.

Not until we have grasped that concept, and eschewed the fallacy of thinking we can bring about an ideal condition of “fairness,” can we meaningfully discuss economic policy. Idiots who want to go chasing after egalitarian will-o’-th’-wisps are free to do so, but we must refuse their invitation to join them on The Great Social Justice Snipe Hunt.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

You are a state governor dealing with a strike of state employees. To end it, you must offer them something. One possibility is to raises their wages. Another is to agree to a more generous pension plan.

Higher wages will come, at least for the next few years, out of your budget—and there are a lot of other things you would like to spend the money on. Higher pensions will be paid, almost entirely, from the budget of later governors. It looks like an easy choice. And, since you aren’t the one paying, there is no good reason for you to be stingy in your offer, especially if being generous might end the strike sooner and buy you future political support from the currently striking union. Follow out the logic of the situation and one can see why many U.S. states currently face serious budget problems, in part due to very generous employee pension plans.

Read it.

For some reason I just can’t see a language as an appropriate subject for a ‘major’. I suppose they actually mean the literature of the language, as ‘English Major’ is actually shorthand for ‘English Lit Major’.

Read it.

The Groningen professors Bauke Dijkstra and Lubbert Dijkhuizen have deciphered the structure and functional mechanism of the glucansucrase enzyme that is responsible for dental plaque sticking to teeth. This knowledge will stimulate the identification of substances that inhibit the enzyme. Just add that substance to toothpaste, or even sweets, and caries will be a thing of the past.

Read it.

Al Qaeda has gotten to the sharks.

Read it.

This phenomenon — attacking one set of Christians, or non-Muslims in general, in response to another — has roots in Islamic law. The Pact of Omar, a foundational text for Islam’s treatment of dhimmis (i.e., non-Muslims who refused to convert after their lands were seized by Islam) makes this clear. The consequences of breaking any of the debilitating and humiliating conditions Christians were made to accept in order to be granted a degree of surety by the Muslim state — including things like giving up their seats to Muslims, as a show of “respect” — were clear: “If we in any way violate these undertakings for which we ourselves stand surety, we forfeit our covenant [dhimma], and we become liable to the penalties for contumacy and sedition [that is, they become viewed as “unprotected” infidels, and thus exposed to the same treatment, including slavery, rapine, and death.].”

Moreover, the actions of the individual affect the entire group — hence the “hostage” aspect (everyone is under threat to ensure that everyone behaves). As Mark Durie points out, “Even a breach by a single individual dhimmi could result in jihad being enacted against the whole community. Muslim jurists have made this principle explicit, for example, the Yemeni jurist al-Murtada wrote that ‘The agreement will be canceled if all or some of them break it…’ and the Moroccan al-Maghili taught ‘The fact that one individual (or one group) among them has broken the statute is enough to invalidate it for all of them'” (The Third Choice, p.160).

In a war where only one side is fighting, guess who wins?

Read it.

We have the technology … almost.

Freeberg creates a new word.

A mental illness in which a patient is simply unable to accept a situation in which another thinking person possesses a commensurately durable command of the relevant facts, and has pursued some valid and competent thinking process to arrive at different ideas regarding what it all means or what should be done. Persons suffering from this disease leap instantly to the conclusion that if you disagree, you have to be stupid.

So the College-itis patient suffers from something worse than a lack of experience. He ends up suffering from an extreme lack of appreciation for its very significance (other than, of course, his own experience taking the class which is all-important). The sufferer has been programmed to accept the concept of negative knowledge: Just as a person’s opinion might be dismissed as ignorant if it is formed prematurely, with a scarcity of observed fact or opinion to back it up — and then that person could be labeled “stupid” and ejected from subsequent discussions as well — the same goes for a person who has managed to gain command of an uncontrolled abundance of knowledge, or knowledge outside the body of knowledge that is approved by the authorities — knowledge outside the syllabus. That person is to be labeled exactly the same way the ignorant person is to be labeled, with no recognized necessity for distinguishing between the two, now or forevermore.

Read it.

It’s been said that, as a productive civilization devolves, society will become ruled, not by law, but by special interest groups—each competing with one another to seize control in order to feed on the carcass of society. The more a civilization moves toward collectivism and devolves, the more citizenry will turn to tribalism—fighting over, like a pack of jackals, whatever scraps are left (or thrown to it by an all-powerful government). Eventually, society will get to the point that it will be controlled by whichever tribe (or pack) has the greater number, the sharpest teeth, the biggest club or largest gun.

Read it.

At least 120 white farmers in Zimbabwe have returned to the land by setting up farms under leasehold deals with the black beneficiaries of Robert Mugabe’s land seizure policies.

These people are certifiable idiots. Let’s hope they don’t breed and pass their defective genes on to future generations. (Fortunately, in Zimbabwe they probably won’t live that long. But still.)

Read it.

Obviously, those are the guys doing denial-of-service attacks on their hosting providers.

It’s all so clear to me now.

Megan McArdle is always worth reading.

Having recently entered into homeownership, I am now in the unhappy state of having to advocate against my own interest. As someone whose freelance expenses make it worthwhile to itemize, I plan to take the mortgage interest tax deduction until they phase the damn thing out, or I pay off the house, whichever comes first.  But as an economics journalist, I retain my deep hatred for the thing.

The reason we have a mortgage interest tax deduction is that all interest used to be deductible, because way back when the income tax was invented, consumer credit wasn’t really much of a concept, so interest on loans was much more likely to be a business expense incurred in the acquisition of an income-producing asset, rather than a personal expense incurred in the acquisition of a 60-inch flat panel television with built-in Blu-ray player.

I remember being able to deduct my credit-card interest. It made being a Conspicuous Consumer a lot more bearable.

It was fairly obvious that, with the possible exception of the student loans, none of this debt had any connection to an income-producing asset.  So they pencilled out the deductibility of interest payments.  Then they realized what this would do to housing prices, and the mood of taxpayers who had just lost their largest deduction, and pencilled it right back in.

Read it.

British news is always much more interesting than American news.

Read it.

Get in touch with your inner Corleone.

‘Realtor Connie Profaci’? A good touch….

Freeberg reiterates a few inconvenient truths.

This has been exposed as a falsity the first time we cut tax rates and experienced increased tax income as a direct result. And then, we did that a few more times. I’ve yet to hear of it going the other way; we cut a tax rate, and aw darn the revenues fell because the rate was cut. Are there examples of this? I don’t see anyone offering any. That is why we have this notion of a “tax cut costs money” down as Item #7 on our list of things that give you away as a clueless dork.

So our usual leftists are irked by the idea of taxes being cut for the “wealthy,” and they like to see the taxes increased in those brackets. This is not new, and it may be legitimate to say in these post-French-Revolution times, this is a good definition for what that word “left” really means: Make some profit for yourself, and you shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. The more you’re taxed, the better.

There are rich liberals around, and I’m not just talking about Warren Buffet. Some liberals are richer than other liberals. How come we don’t have liberals grilling other wealthier liberals about mailing off extra dough to the IRS, until the glorious day comes that their tax liabilities are assessed at the level they should be?

I don’t understand why the average progressive mind becomes so agitated and unhinged about the slope of this taxation curve. Even if they are the direct beneficiaries of the associated services, this country has been drunk on deficit-spending for decades so it’s not like they’ll feel it when the rich are soaked-real-good. Is this nothing more than a middle-school-level “us versus them” thing? I just don’t understand it, the hatred.

Freeberg takes a look at the latest incarnation of the Nullification concept.

We have a lot of lavishly funded political movements lately — ObamaCare was one, but there are many others — that have something to do with a “deflowering” event. Say yes here, and it will never be possible to say no, ever again.

Read it.

We have the technology.

My question is: How did they find out he had this setup? Eh?

The Other McCain speaks for me.

He lost me at “not”:

“We are not going to deport 11 million people,” Gingrich said Thursday as he kicked off his first forum on Latino issues. “There has to be some zone between deportation and amnesty.”

We are also not going to be able to kill or capture every terrorist in the world, but we don’t go around proclaiming that in public, do we?

What Newt is saying here is simple: Surrender.

The problem with politicians is that they get hung up on practicality and always let it trump principle. Whether we can deport 11 million people is a speculation without any evidence to support a determination one way or another (How will we know unless we try?); the point being lost sight of here is that it’s not a binary decision, i.e. the choice is not between ‘deport none of them’ and ‘deport all of them’, with nothing in between. Let’s deport as many as we can catch, and live with the fact that every one we deport makes our situation better.

Read it.

Needless to say, it was someone ‘not of native British background’.

Read it.

Thieves in Britain are using Google Earth to target lead roofs on Church of England buildings to sell on the lucrative metals market, a Church spokesman said. About 8,000 insurance claims have been made for lead theft worth about 23 million pounds ($35.93 million) during the past three years, Church estates commissioner Tony Baldry said during a debate in Westminster Hall this week.

Quasimodo is never around when you need him.

On the other hand, if some guy is on top of your church stripping the lead off of it, isn’t that going to be rather obvious?

Read it.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel in her opening statement to delegates gathered in Cancun, Mexico, noting that Ixchel was not only goddess of the moon, but also “the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving. May she inspire you — because today, you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change, using both reason and creativity as your tools.”

Which just underscores the notion that environmentalism is just a form of neo-paganism. Imagine the uproar if a U.N. official had said a Christian or Jewish (or Hindu or Buddhist) prayer? (Not that a U.N. official would do such a thing, of course).

Read it.

Could it be that the insurance industry depends on the Death Tax to make about half of its product lines even halfway attractive. Could it be?

UPDATE: Megan McArdle goes into greater detail.

Read it.

Here’s the part I like:

A fisherman holds the shark which was identified by an Egyptian diver as the shark which attacked four tourists in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

How? Fingerprints?

Read it.

The Nato campaign to assassinate militant leaders has bred a new generation of radical commanders more violent than those they replace, a Taliban envoy-turned negotiator has said.

And if you believe that one, he’ll tell you another one. When are people going to learn that lying for a terrorist is like swimming for a fish?

Mullah Mujahid however said an older more pragmatic generation of Taliban leaders was being replaced by zealots opposed to any reconciliation.

Great. Let’s see how that works out for them. We’ve got plenty of drones.

Read it.

Indeed, ‘Freakonomics’ is exactly the right title for the column.

Stephen J. Dubner is an author and journalist who lives in New York City.

And a Voice of the Crust. They left out the most important part.

The entire premise of the article is that this money somehow belongs rightfully to the government, and these slimy bastards, just by dying during the year when there is no estate tax, thereby screwed the government out of all this money that was rightfully its.

Read it.

Yes, it’s a steam powered record player. Playing a punk LP. The Sex Pistols – God save the Queen (Victoria obviously).

You know you want one.

Read it.

The Six Porkers:

Chuck Grassley
Kit Bond
Sam Brownback
John Thune
Mike Johanns
Mark Kirk