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 In August 2011, Download.com started wrapping legitimate 3rd party software into their own installer which by default installs a wide variety of adware and other questionable software on users machines. It also does things like redirect user search queries and change their Internet home page. At first their installer forced people to accept the malware or close the installer (see screen shot of infected VLC installer in this article). Later they added a non-default “decline” button hidden way on the left side of the panel. Also, the initial installer shown in the previous screen shot claimed the software was “SAFE, TRUSTED, AND SPYWARE FREE”. In an unusual show of honesty, they removed that claim from the rogue installer.

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Soon to be a major motion picture, no doubt.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Let the whining begin.

“If approximately 75 percent of your workforce disappears, what are you to do?” the Florida Grower trade monthly asks in its current issue.

Oh, let me think — raise wages, maybe? Until you get people who are here legally? It’s called a free market. You might try it some time.

With unemployment near record highs, “these jobs should go to legal workers,” he said June 14 when he introduced the bill.

What an extremist!

Farmers could hire legal guest workers under a U.S. H-2A visa program, which provides entry for temporary or seasonal agricultural work.

But these workers must be covered by U.S. wage laws, workers’ compensation and other standards farmers say they can’t afford, the Post says.

Welcome to our world of massive government over-regulation.

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To give pupils a lesson in “sustainability” they’ll never forget, headmaster Rob Benzie of Ansford Academy in Castle Cary, Somerset, ordered a “No Power Day … as an experiment to see if we can lower our carbon footprint”.

Join the SCA, you can do that any weekend.

Freeberg contrasts a selection of pro-Obama headlines now with corresponding anti-Bush headlines then.

Situation’s pretty much the same…except the unemployment rate being talked about seven years ago was 5.7%. How sweet would that be now.

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Once a streetcar suburb reaches a critical density of white people, it has officially arrived at its Platonic ideal Form, and redevelopment must be halted for fear of yuppies casting shadows on hipsters.

What do the Crust talk about amongst themselves? Look and see.

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

Another pointed reminder that democracy is not a Muslim value.

Steve Sailer asks an important question.

Are people being pulled by the top or pushed by the bottom? Bigger houses, especially when mandated by developers and / or zoning, are not only an attempt to get closer to the top, they are very much an attempt to get farther away from the bottom, to physically escape to neighborhoods and school districts where the bottom can’t afford to live.

The median home foreclosed in California was about 1500 square feet. Professors and journalists have a hard time grasping the scale of the various factors because they spend so much more of their time around the hugely rich than anybody else in their pay grade. They also try to avoid spending time with the 85-100 IQ working class, so they are pretty clueless.

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If there aren’t any Jews or American’s handy, Muslims will quite cheerfully blow each other up.

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

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Slow news day. And my sinuses are acting up.

Besides, you can never know too much about puffer fish.

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Everyone realizes that healthcare’s hyperinflation is unsustainable and D.C. has proven itself incapable addressing the healthcare cost crisis. One of the last major crises in the U.S. was the response to Hurricane Katrina. Walmart was at the forefront of hurricane relief while the government struggled to respond. This is a different kind of crisis, but Walmart might just demonstrate that they can be more effective than the federal government once again.

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Ezekiel Emanuel reminded New York Times readers last week of something health economists have known for eight decades. Health expenditures are highly concentrated, with just 10 percent of the population accounting for nearly two-thirds of annual health spending. Wall Street protesters have sparked a fierce debate over trends in the share of income and wealth controlled by the top 1 percent. But no informed American aspires to be in the health spending 1 percent.

Of course, the assumption in this article, as in every article I’ve seen on the subject, is that we simply must find a way to spread the cost of the 1 percent over the wallets of the 99% so that everybody winds up paying the same. But why? We don’t make all purchasers of automobiles pay the same, whether they’re buying a Cadillac or a Kia. We don’t make all purchasers of houses pay the same, whether they live in Beverly Hills or Detroit. We don’t make all diners pay the same, whether they’re eating at Alinea or McDonald’s.

People never tire of bitching & moaning about the cost of health care, but it’s only a problem because people don’t pay for their own — everybody pays either too much or too little, with no obvious connection between what you pay and what you get. That’s insane.

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Science Daily is reporting a truly depressing new study that finds that when it comes to complicated economic issues, people default to trusting government to address them.

Matt Welch takes out the garbage.

Consider for a moment the paradoxical pain of being a best-selling political pundit so successful that American presidents don’t just seek but heed your advice. You have lobbied in your columns for the commander in chief to deploy your signature catch phrases, and he has. You have, in times of both crisis and sloth, advocated robust federal action in the name of national “greatness,” and the people in power have mostly followed suit. You have been flattered by invitations to the White House and pecked at by lesser partisans, yet you’ve maintained your critical distance in the patriotic spirit of post-ideological problem solving. All this influence and success, and somehow the country still sucks.

Do something. Is there a two-word phrase in politics more loaded with disguised ideological content? Embedded within is both an urgent call for powerful government action and an up-front declaration that the policy details don’t matter. The bigger the crisis, the more the urgency, the sparser the detail. On September 30, 2008, in a classic of the do-something genre, Brooks argued that the Troubled Asset Relief Program should be rammed through Congress over public objections because the federal government needed “to give people a sense that somebody was in charge, that something was going to be done.” Did that “something” involve buying up toxic assets? Introducing or relaxing certain banking regulations? Taking over or winding down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Not important. “What we need in this situation,” Brooks declared, “is authority.”

In 1948, President Truman campaigned, successfully as it turned out, against the ‘do-nothing Congress’. Since Teddy Roosevelt parachuted into the Presidency, the motto in Washington is ‘Do something, even if it’s wrong.’ And that’s what has gotten us into the fix we’re in today — because when Washington ‘does something’, the odds are overwhelming that it will just make the situation worse. But they still do what they do, because they are essentially a one-trick pony. No matter is too trivial or irrelevant to the established purpose of the Federal government to escape the notice — and the attention — of Chuck Schumer or Al Franken. No matter is so clear-cut that John McCain or his comedy sidekick Lindsey Graham won’t want to craft some sort of compromise that only spends half as much (which we still can’t afford). No politician in the history of the United States, so far as I am aware, has had the courage to say ‘I’m here to keep somebody worse from causing the sort of trouble someone in this office could so easily cause.’ I would vote for such a person.

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The central myth of the JFK assassination was that a climate of hate inspired by the far right created the conditions for President Kennedy’s murder. A single assassin may have pulled the trigger, but he was put up to it by an undercurrent of hatred and bigotry that President Kennedy tried but failed to subdue. On this view President Kennedy was a martyr, somewhat like Abraham Lincoln, to the causes of civil rights, racial justice, and an elevated liberalism. JFK’s assassination was a tragic but richly symbolic event for many Americans who saw it as a vivid expression of an ongoing battle in American life between the forces of light and darkness.

This explanation for the assassination did not drop out of thin air but was circulated immediately after the event by influential leaders, journalists, and journalistic outlets, including Mrs. Kennedy, President Johnson, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, James Reston, Russell Baker, and the editorial page of the New York Times, columnist Drew Pearson, and any number of other liberal spokesmen. Mrs. Kennedy took the lead in insisting that her husband was martyred by agents of hatred and bigotry. Within days of the assassination, she elaborated the symbolism of Camelot and King Arthur’s court to frame the Kennedy presidency as a special and near-magical enterprise guided by the highest ideals. The eternal flame she placed on his grave site invokes King Arthur’s candle in the wind as imagined by T. H. White in his Arthurian novel, The Once and Future King, later the basis of a Broadway musical that was popular during the Kennedy years.

These were the myths, illusions, and outright fabrications in which the Kennedy assassination came to be encrusted. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they are still widely believed. In fact, the Kennedy legend, incorporating the myths about his assassination, is closely intertwined with the history of modern liberalism: JFK has come to represent a liberal ideal and his assassination the threat posed to it by the forces of the far right.

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And why not? He’d have done the same to her, or worse.

Well done, Sergeant Taylor.

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Some time ago, I got to talking with my grandfather (WWII generation) about the Baby Boomers.  I was somewhat surprised by his generational admission—not so much by what he said, but by the fact that he essentially said mea culpa for the Greatest Generation as a whole.

He explained to me that growing up during the Depression was really hard.  City kids frequently had to keep cows and such (in the city no less) and really scrounge to make ends meet.  Because of this, they really really wanted to make sure that their own kids in the future would never have to do anything like that.  This of course led them to ask very little if anything of their own kids (the Baby Boomers), probably contributing heavily to that generation’s narcissism.

Exactly what I’ve been saying for years.

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A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

Actually, beer is full of carbohydrates — it’s not quite a direct substitute for bread in a diet, but its contribution to the diet can be substantial.

Eric Raymond spreads some truth.

In a discussion thread that wandered to the subject of Walmart and its enemies, I said “Scratch a Walmart-basher and you’ll find a snotty elitist, a person who hates capitalism and consumption and deep down thinks the Wrong People have Too Much Stuff.”

Preach it, brother.

I find that, as little as I like excess and overconsumption, voicing that dislike gives power to people and political tendencies that I consider far more dangerous than overconsumption. I’d rather be surrounded by fat people who buy too much stuff than concede any ground at all to busybodies and would-be social engineers.

Yeah, we’re looking at you, Michelle-ma-belle.

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Witnesses reported hearing a “tremendous noise” just a few moments before the accident on the Yamaguchi prefecture highway amid terrible driving conditions.

While the majority of the 14 vehicles – which also included a Japanese supercar Nissan GT-R Skyline and a Toyota Prius – were travelling along the Osaka Prefecture-bound bended lane at least one Mercedes CL600 was driving in the opposite direction.

Television footage showed the cars – either wrecked or destroyed – spread across the highway, in a trail of crumpled metal and broken glass. Several of the vehicles were wedged up against the metal barriers.

Well, sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it don’t.

Jehu reminds us of what America used to be like.

My wife and little ones are big fans of going to the beach, even though beaches in Oregon and Northern California aren’t about swimming.  On the way to many of our favorite spots though, we pass through lots of extremely white small towns on the coast.  One thing that jumps out is the very high levels of trust that persist there (the second being the celebrity treatment my two little tiny redheads get from the many grandparents that inhabit such places).  Here is an example—it strikes me as profoundly alien every single time I pass it because of all the things it implies.
In the middle of a very small parking lot—really more of a spot where one could pull off the coastal highway than a parking lot honestly—there are stacks of bundles of firewood, and a sign advertising them for sale for the customary $5 or so.  Next to the sign is a bucket where you can put your payment.  That’s it.  No watchman or clerk, no cameras…Nothing.  But it’s been here for years now, so apparently the guy who cuts the wood must not get ripped off often.  This speaks to positively alien levels of trust by the standards of the societies that I’ve been a part of.

Just to hammer the point home with a large mallet, try doing that in a place that has large numbers of black or Latino people.

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Well, it’s really an extrapolation. But it makes as much sense as anything she’s actually said.

Jehu points a gimlet eye at the degenerate modern world.

Most talk of redistribution and fairness strikes me this way.  Obviously, most people lack the self-awareness to recognize this even when it perfectly encapsulates their revealed preferences.

For instance, the very smart tend to want raw intelligence to be a big part of the metric according to which society hands out its goodies.  They call it meritocracy.  There are certainly arguments of efficiency, but there’s no moral reason why, for instance, someone with a 3 sigma IQ and a 0 sigma level of physical development should be favored over someone with 2 sigma IQ and 1 sigma of physical development for spots at say, Harvard.  Those who have the power to do so or control over the cultural battlespace get to define the formula and then afterwards we all are expected to pretend that it is henceforth sacred.

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The illegals don’t need to be “brought out of the shadows” because they live and work openly. DREAM Act students demonstrate about their status and nobody gets deported. Illegal kids get free K-12 on the backs of the taxpayers courtesy of the Supreme Court, and they are now demanding a “right” to a subsidized college education as well.

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

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My name is Bosch and I’m a recovering Muslim.

That is, if Muslims don’t kill me for leaving Islam, which it requires them to do.

I’ve been around Muslims my entire life and most of them truly don’t care about Islam. The problem I have with many of these essentially non-Muslim Muslims, especially in the middle of this war being waged on us by their more consistent co-religionists, is that they give the enemy cover. They force us to play a game of Muslim Roulette since we can’t tell which Muslim is going to blow himself up until he does. And their indifference about the evil being committed in the name of their religion is a big reason why their reputation is where it is.

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Which eliminates him as a possible Republican nominee. Glad to have that out of the way.

Now, let’s see him justify pretending to be a Republican. (Not impossible … look at Arlen Specter and Lindsey Graham … but guaranteed to be somewhat amusing.)

It’s hard to argue with Johnson here if you dig liberty.

And that’s the kind of ‘reason’ you get at ‘Reason magazine’, a name that is about as oxymoronic as those of most left-liberal think tanks. The fact that ‘marriage’ is a term with an ancient established meaning that has never included homosexual relationships, and has nothing to do with ‘liberty’, is, apparently, not even on the radar with these soi-disant ‘libertarians’.

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I can hear Dennis now: ‘Yet more jobs lost! Will the madness never end?’

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Apparently the lady had a design of a gun (not a gun, a design of a gun) on her handbag.

Even after they figured out the gun was a fake, TSA officials still wouldn’t let her take the purse into the cabin. They also took so long that Gibbs missed her flight.

Fly the friendly skies. I like to think that Muslim terrorists are even partly as inconvenienced by the Gestapo TSA as ordinary citizens are, but I’m not going to bet on it.

John Hinderaker points out some inconvenient truth.

Under the U.K.’s National Health Service, death panels put patients who are believed to be terminally ill on a “death pathway.” Of course, it is sometimes inconvenient to mention the fact to the patient’s relatives:

NHS doctors are failing to inform up to half of families that their loved ones have been put on a scheme to help end their lives, the Royal College of Physicians has found.

Gotta love that government health care! Through the mercy of the Obamassiah, we can have that here!

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Gunmen attacked and sprayed an Afghan family with acid in their home after the father rejected a man’s bid to marry his teenage daughter, authorities said Thursday.

The gunmen broke into their home and attacked the 18-year-old daughter, her two sisters and their parents, according to authorities in Kunduz province.

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

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Clue: No.

Would students go to med schools that boasted of having as teachers people who had never seen a patient? And yet that’s what most big-name law schools depend on. The way to a fabulous lifetime job as a law professor is to go to a top-tier law school, make law review, clerk for a federal judge or (even better) Supreme Court justice, and then slip into your professorate. (If you’re feeling adventurous, you can work in-house for some government agency or legislator.) The wipe-the-farmyard-dirt-off-your-boots guys who have actually practiced law are relegated to the ranks of ‘adjunct’ faculty (and you can hear the sneer when the tenured profs say it) who are only hired when third-year students are panicking because they’ve realized that they have no clue where to go to file a lawsuit (should the occasion ever arise, which it probably won’t).

Fjordman takes a break from dodging dhimmis in European governments to share some wisdom.

I have challenged Marie Simonsen, commentator in Dagbladet, to provide some concrete examples of places where Muslims have lived peacefully with their non-Muslim neighbors over longer periods of time. Personally, I don’t think any such place exists, which means that the term Islamophobia, so frequently used by her newspaper and others, is completely meaningless.

And not only meaningless, but a tendentious political tag deliberately created to divert attention from the Muslim agenda, which is set out quite clearly in the Koran.

The political scientist Øystein Hetland described me on 31 October as an extremist, among other reasons because I am very critical towards Islam, and ask what it takes to make a democratic society work. I wrote the following on Gates of Vienna on the occasion of my fifth anniversary as Fjordman: “Are Islamic teachings inherently violent? Yes. Can Islam be reformed? No. Can Islam be reconciled with our way of life? No. Is there such as thing as a moderate Islam? No. Can we continue to allow Muslims to settle in our countries? No.”

These few sentences contain all the information about Islam you will ever need. Do I regret writing this? No. One ought to tell the truth, even when it is unpleasant.

Danny Sullivan brings some sense to a ‘progressive’ stupid-fest.

“I’m standing in front of a Planned Parenthood,” the CNN reporter says, “And Siri can’t find it when I search for abortion clinic.” No, it can’t. It’s not because Apple is pro-life. It’s because Planned Parenthood doesn’t call itself an abortion clinic.

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

It also doesn’t call itself an organization devoted to genocide against black people, although that’s how it started.

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Former Philadelphia schools superintendent Arlene Ackerman, who was given a nearly $1-million buyout earlier this year, has applied for unemployment.

School District spokesman Fernando Gallard today confirmed that Ackerman wants to collect state unemployment benefits.

I guess black people just assume they’re entitled to money from the taxpayers, whether they deserve it or not.

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I find it curious that the government of Iran spends so much effort on the charade that these students aren’t doing what the government of Iran wants done. Certainly nobody in the ‘developing world’ buys that story.

There may be some dimwitted people in the West — in fact, there almost certainly are a great number of such people — who are fooled by this pretense, but none of them are of any importance.

“How long must we endure the presence of the British in Iran … when they interfere in affairs that relate to the country’s national interests … and commit treachery against the Iranian people?” Larijani asked, as he denounced Britain’s “excessive” reaction.

I’m curious as to what relationship this Larijani fellow thinks exists between the British and the ‘Iranian people’ that would make the term ‘treachery’ anything other than a random mouth-fart.

Is puzzle.

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Clue: Obama and the Democrats. That’s just me, of course; the author of the article doesn’t even attempt to answer the question.

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In general, being less helpful is essential to helping students learn to be self-sufficient, to learn better study skills, and to develop better study habits. It’s just as important a part of their education as any lecture on higher-order procedures.

Actually, in my case it’s just generalized misanthropy garnished with occasional bloody-mindedness, but this serves as a convenient rationalization.

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The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for Nebraska, charges that UNK and its employees engaged in a pattern or practice of violating the Fair Housing Act or denied rights protected by the act by denying reasonable accommodation requests by students with psychological or emotional disabilities seeking to live with emotional assistance animals in university housing.

‘Emotional assistance animals’? One would think that kids who are emotionally dependent on a dog or a cat really don’t belong in college.

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Tell the truth, we’ve all wanted to do that.

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And, once again, rats get all the good stuff first.