Read it.

Although what reason the U.S. would have to invade their piss-ant country is left as an exercise for the reader, I guess.

What a great idea! Perhaps we ought to train a million-strong guerrilla army to defend the US against a Mexican invasion.

Oops! Too late….

Read it.

The extension of these areas was calculated by MIT and IBM, analysing anonymised call data. The map delineates zones in which people are more likely to call someone inside those areas rather than outside of them. The result is a revelatory re-mixing of states of America. Some split, others merge with their neighbours.

Read it.

At Commerce, a restaurant in the West Village in Manhattan, the bar menus read, “Credit cards only. No cash please. Thank you.”

The must not understand what ‘Legal tender for all debts, public and private’ means.

Read it.

In the months before a US Presidential election, the quality of political discourse hits new lows. Blue State/Red State tropes dominate the news cycle as the media gins up outrage over perceived injustices in the culture wars. It’s all about our differences. So I started wondering, how do Americans really think about “those people” in other states? What are the most common stereotypes? For each of the fifty states and DC, I asked Google: “Why is [State] so ” and let it autocomplete. It seemed like an ideal question to get at popular assumptions, since “Why is [State] so X?” presupposes that X is true.

The results are quite entertaining.

Read it.

Proving that learning a lesson is very, very difficult, North Face has taken the former owners of South Butt to court again. What happened at the conclusion of the original lawsuit was South Butt agreed to drop their brand entirely as part of an injunction. Then, according to North Face, they jumped right back into their old shenannigan ways, forming the company Why Climb Mountains LLC and registering for a trademark on their new brand Butt Face.

This is why I could never be an attorney — you have to argue these cases with a straight face just because they drones running the company pay you.

 The other interesting tidbit in North Face’s complaints is that they believe…wait for it…that WCM’s owners are simply using the lawsuits filed against it as publicity. They reached the same conclusion as we had years ago. But, in an apparent attempt to test a theory called “litigation through stubborness”, they filed suit and gave their adversaries more ammuntion for publicity. It would be as though I had an ant problem in my kitchen because I left some honey out on the counter and my response was to cover the counter in honey while complaining about the ants marching in.

Hey — there are a lot of humor-impaired people in the world. Most of them are Democrats and buy shit from North Face. “I don’t really climb mountains but I’d like you to think that I do.” Not quite as pathetic as survivalists, but pretty close.

Pat Buchanan has a Blind Pig Moment.

The Middle East was sliced up along lines set down in the secret Sykes-Picot agreement. But with the Islamic awakening and Arab Spring toppling regimes, the natural map of the Middle East seems now to be asserting itself.

Good luck with that.

A Kurdish nation carved out of Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran would appear to be a casus belli for all four nations. Yet in any natural map of the world, there would be a Kurdistan.

And they deserve it if anybody does. The problem is that authoritarian regimes (and their enablers in the West) won’t give up a spadeful of ground unless you pry it out of their cold dead fingers, and sometimes not even then.

Read it. And watch the video.

The Roto-a-Matic has recently gone live in toy maker Rotofugi’s store in Chicago, and will create a polyethylene plastic figurine for you in under a minute, provided you feed it a token. Rotofugi and product design company Squibbles INK have given the vintage Mold-a-Rama vending machine a new lease of life, and now they are looking for artists to contribute designs for future molds.

Read it.

Rome’s Fiumicino airport has defended its security procedures after a drunk Norwegian tourist fell asleep on a baggage belt and travelled 160 feet before being identified by an X-ray scanner.

Hey, it could happen to anybody….

Read it.

The Farsi Christian News Network (FCNN) cited on its website Friday a report from the Tehran-based, Persian-language Haran News Agency that Christian activist and House Church organizer Fat’hi was sentenced to a six-year prison term, based on charges of “acting against national security through membership of the Christian organization Ilam, collection of funds and propaganda against the Islamic Regime by helping spread Christianity in the country.”

According to FCNN, Fat’hi converted to Christianity and was one of a high number of Christian activists arrested by the security agencies of the Islamic Republic during Christmas 2010.

If he converted from Islam, he’s lucky they didn’t behead him — the penalty laid down in strict shari’a.

Yet another reminder the freedom of religion is not a Muslim value.

Read it.

The state of Massachusetts has spent more than $275,000 mailing voter registration forms to welfare recipients in advance of the Scott Brown-Elizabeth Warren Senate election, the Boston Herald reports.

Of course. They paid for ’em, and they want to collect.

The Other McCain blows the whistle.

When are liberal idealists going to wake up and realize that Democrats treat them like a bunch of chumps, suckers to be played? You’re no better than the Democrats in Montana who elected a governor who slurs them as racist rednecks. It’s as if liberals keep acting out some sort of psycho-drama as a way of dealing with their self-esteem issues: “I don’t deserve to be respected.”

When the Left says ‘Question Authority’, the question they usually ask is ‘What’s in it for me?’

Read it.

I have this vision of shari’a coming to Washington, and all of a sudden we have a town full of one-handed people.

Hmmm.

Read it.

Scientists used nanotechnology to repair tissues damaged in heart attacks in rats and pigs, suggesting a possible new way to treat people who’ve suffered the same ailment.

Read it.

While many parents hope sports will pave the way for their child to win a scholarship, some sports organizations say parents are steering their children toward less-popular sports with the goal of securing a spot on a Division III team with no money attached—but with the promise of a top-tier education.

At the Manhattan Fencing Club, home to four-time Olympic coach Yuri Gelman, “85 percent of our kids get into fencing to help them get accepted into an Ivy League university—which don’t give athletic scholarships—or Division I school,” says director Julie Gelman. “A lot of kids were able to get into schools that they otherwise wouldn’t have if they weren’t fencing.”

Read it.

 A section of the centuries-old Great Wall of China has collapsed due to a combination of heavy rainfall and construction works.

Read it.

When a blue whale goes, it goes big.

Read it.

A teenager, who joined two rival gangs as they ransacked businesses in London last year, had sought asylum in the UK and was housed in a £3 million flat in Kensington, it was reported.

Yet further evidence that poverty doesn’t cause crime, assholeness causes crime.

Nasir Muhsen, 18, was one of several youths who went on a rampage through the capital during last summer’s riots.

And why not? Allah gave Muslims kufr as prey, as Mohammed demonstrated constantly during his life.

Read it.

Underneath the pubs, shops, houses, and office buildings of Nottingham lie more than five hundred man-made caves, carved into the city’s soft sandstone bedrock over a thousand years, and now largely abandoned and forgotten.

Read it.

Facing a cardiac crisis that threatened his life, the Palestinian man sought relief from an Israeli hospital. It’s not a remarkable event – Israeli doctors treated 115,000 Palestinians in 2011. What’s remarkable is the patient’s family.

His brother-in-law is Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, a man who leads a group obsessed with destroying Israel and who spreads vile conspiracies about the Jewish state.

Suhila Abd el-Salam Ahmed Haniyeh’s husband spent about a week in a Petah Tikva hospital. He even was transported in a Magen David Adom ambulance. His wife, Haniyeh’s sister, was with him throughout. The episode happened four months ago but was just reported this week by Ynetnews.

Haniyeh paid back the kindness this week by accusing Israel of being behind a jihadist attack that killed 16 Egyptian soldiers Monday. The terrorists tried to drive hijacked vehicles into Israel to continue their killing, but were intercepted by the Israeli military.

Apparently gratitude is not a Muslim virtue, either.

Read it.

Under the direction of Katharina von Kriegstein, the researchers conducted two experiments in which several volunteers had to perform various speech comprehension tasks. When affected individuals performed tasks that required the recognition of speech sounds, as compared to recognize the voices that pronounced the same speech, magnetic resonance tomography (MRT) recordings showed abnormal responses in the area around the medial geniculate body. In contrast, no differences were apparent between controls and dyslexic participants if the tasks involved only listening to the speech sounds without having to perform a specific task. “The problem, therefore, has nothing to do with sensory processing itself, but with the processing involved in speech recognition,” says Díaz. No differences could be ascertained between the two test groups in other areas of the auditory signalling path.

Read it.

In an outcome that must be amusing to social scientists, the percentage of respondents who believed their colleagues would show bias against conservatives was around 10 to 15 percent higher than the number of respondents who said they themselves would show biases. The problem is always other people, isn’t it?

At the 2011 meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia polled the audience of some 1,000 in a convention center ballroom to ask how many were liberals (the vast majority of hands went up), how many were centrists or libertarians (he counted a couple dozen or so), and how many were conservatives (three hands went up). In his talk, he said that the conference reflected “a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” in a country where 40 percent of Americans are conservative and only 20 percent are liberal. He said he worried about the discipline becoming a “tribal-moral community” in ways that hurt the field’s credibility.

Read it.

Australia’s hotel industry has been rocked by a court’s ruling that a prostitute was illegally discriminated against by a motel owner who refused to rent her a room to work from.

Gotta love Australians.

Read it.

Mostly stuff you knew already or could figure out, but it’s amusing dragging it all into one steaming pile.

Read it.

t has to be evident to all thinking people by now that racism is the new witchcraft. Once you’re branded with the Scarlet “R,” some people do not regard it as immoral to assault you…or worse.

Calling someone a racist is sufficient to brand them as outside the pale of civilized company. In academia, the accusation is a career-wrecker. Socially it is enough to get you dropped from the A-list of the best parties.

Read it.

Connecticut vacationers will have their fun cut short as area Democrats shut down two of the state’s more popular beaches for an Obama celebrity fundraiser.

If ye be not of the Crust, ye be shit.

Read it.

In what may contradict testimony by Obama administration officials under oath and may be a violation of federal law, The Daily Caller obtained emails that show Timothy Geithner’s Treasury Department “was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 salaried retirees at the Delphi auto parts manufacturing company,” and the move, according to The Daily Caller, “appears to have been made solely because those retirees were not members of labor unions.”

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

Read it.

Well. There it is.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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

Read it.

Sure enough, now that the data are in, the emerging consensus is that health care costs, rather than “skyrocketing,” have been moderating, even flat-lining. And they were beginning to do so well before Congress passed ObamaCare in March 2010.

There have been a trickling of academic papers and journal articles tracking the trend, but the news hasn’t really yet made it fully into the political discussion.

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

Read it.

There is less here than meets the eye. tReason magazine has some fun with that:

CNN’s reporting of the new study focuses on one Mercedes Lipscomb, who was rejected from the National Guard for being 80 pounds overweight. She lost the weight on her own. First of all, good for her. Second of all, way to point out that this problem does not require government intervention.

More to the point, CNN’s reporting goes on about the cost to the military ($60 million) to have to replace overweight recruits that are unable to complete their service, which means the military is apparently letting in some of these 25 percent. Another full 50 percent of young Americans are disqualified due to poor education and criminal records, but you won’t find any suggestions of charter schools or legal reform (the early education programs are supposed to solve these problems).

Read it.

People retiring today are part of the first generation of workers who have paid more in Social Security taxes during their careers than they will receive in benefits after they retire. It’s a historic shift that will only get worse for future retirees, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.

Stanley Fish looks at an important subject.

 The standard rationale for academic freedom is that the business of the academy is to advance knowledge by conducting inquiries the outcomes of which are not known in advance. Since the obligation is to follow the evidence wherever it leads rather than to a “pre-stipulated goal” (a phrase Riley takes from my writings), researchers must be free to go down paths as they suggest themselves and not in obedience to a political program or an ideology. That is why (and again she is quoting me) “the degree of latitude and flexibility” that attends academic freedom is “not granted to the practitioners of other professions.”

But, Riley observes, “a significant portion of [the] additional degrees that colleges have added in the past few decades have been in vocational areas,” and those areas “simply do not engage students in a search for ultimate truths,” but instead have pre-stipulated goals. “Do we need,” she asks, “to guarantee the academic freedom of professors engaged in teaching and studying ‘Transportation and Materials Moving,’ a field in which more than five thousand degrees were awarded in 2006?”

Here we see quite plainly put the two incompatible purposes being served by ‘universities’ these days: As teaching institutions, and as research institutions. The reason undergraduates go to college is to be taught; the reason professors go to college is toresearch, and the tenure process is deliberately designed to reward those who research whether or not they are any good at teaching.

However much it may be the business of a university to ‘advance knowledge’ at the graduate level, the reason we give this job to professors rather than firemen is because the former are trained for the job, and that training is accomplished the same way that grade school and high school prepare people for life, by imparting facts and skills through rigorous training that does not depend on  ‘conducting inquiries the outcomes of which are not known in advance.’

Scott Locklin seems to be having a lot of fun with ‘skeptics’.

Our protagonist in this non-event: a self-declared “Skepchick.” The woman, Rebecca Watson, is also a feminist. She had given a sermon to a group of “skeptics” on their moral failures as sexists who notice she is a girl when she is at skepticism conferences. This sort of behavior apparently “sexualizes” her as a unique individual, makes her uncomfortable, and generally scares away women skeptics everywhere. This is a common sentiment among shy women who participate in nerdy sausage festivals such as the skepticism movement. It’s less common that said women also publish semi-nude photographs of themselves in pin-up calendars dedicated to the same nerdy sausage festival.

Skepchick took video umbrage with the fact that one of her atheistic colleagues awkwardly asked her back to his room for a cup of coffee after her homily on sexism. He made his pathetic offer while in an elevator with her after a 4AM bar closeout, which suggests that he is probably as socially inept as she is. Princess Skepchick expected more chivalry from a bar populated with convention-going atheist nerds. I can empathize with such sentiments, much as I can empathize with people who visit Muslim countries and miss bacon.

I might observe that someone who objects to being ‘sexualized’ might pick a nom de Net other than one ending in ‘-chick’. Just  a thought.

The Skepchick has called for the head of Richard Dawkins. She dropped the big one, informing him that he is the most loathsome of creatures: the privileged old white man. Being something of a skeptic myself, I find it hard not to notice that young Anglosphere women are easily the most privileged people in the known universe. They’re so privileged that even pie-faced, cabbage-brained ones such Rebecca Watson may be able to ruin a world-famous author’s reputation. Dawkins helped found the shabby movement which gives her the adoration of nerdy dudes who respect her intellect but still wouldn’t mind seeing her topless. Because she has a hoo-ha and can use scary words such as “sexism,” some people accord her moral power comparable to that of Pope Urban VII. What was Dawkins’s blasphemy—that the world doesn’t revolve around some creepy attention-whoring nerd girl’s mild social discomforts? Apparently it does.

A bona fide First World Problem.

I don’t think much of Dawkins. His ideas on evolution are laughable and mostly popularize those of William Hamilton. He is a decent essayist, and his hatred of religion makes him popular with certain kinds of over-emotional atheists, but otherwise, he’s the type of smug bigot who gives unbelievers a bad name. I find his searing hatred of religious people to be childish and disgusting. The fact that Dawkins is being undermined by fellow hater-atheists is delicately ironic. I suppose the more advanced religions kill their gods after all; atheism’s true believers are no different

There is nothing new under the sun; the labels merely change to protect the delusional.

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

 It’s easier to get let into the U.S. legally if you or your loved ones have done something back home that makes your fellow countrymen want to kill you. Emphasize to the U.S. government official how much you are loathed by many of the people who have gotten to know you. What could be better for the citizens of the United States than to import people involved in blood feuds in Albania? If you are some Albanian who minds his own business and stays away from crime and murder, well, good luck in Senator Kennedy’s diversity lottery. But, if you are some Albanian that other Albanians want to kill, well, come on over!

Read it.

On December 15, Saudi authorities raided a private religious function in Jeddah, a city on the Red Sea coast in western Saudi Arabia, and arrested 35 Ethiopian Christian workers.

According to human rights groups and the US government’s Commission on International Religious Freedom, the 29 women and six men faced beatings and sexual assault.

The commission noted that “some of the men detained have alleged that they were physically abused during interrogations and the female detainees reportedly were subjected to intrusive and humiliating body cavity searches. While no formal charges have been made, the detainees reportedly were charged with ‘illicit mingling’ with the opposite sex. Saudi authorities informed sponsors of some of the detainees that their employees were being held because of illegal religious activities. The detainees also reportedly face imminent deportation.”

And the human rights fetishists say: [chirp] … [chirp] … [chirp] ….

Yet another reminder, if one is needed, that freedom of religion is not a Muslim value.

Read it.

If they find out that you’re actually in the country legally, do they strip you of your credits and kick you out in disgrace?

Read it.

And the Obamateur strikes again.

 The President was pictured in the Oval office speaking to Recep Tayyip Erdogan about the escalating crisis in Syria. In one hand was the telephone and the other a bat signed by legendary ballplayer Hank Aaron.

But the photograph caused dismay from opposition Turkish politicians who have interpreted a more menacing message behind the image.

“The photo reveals from whom our Prime Minister receives orders to rule the country,” Metin Lutfi Baydar, an opposition politician for Turkey’s Republican People’s Party (CHP) party, said.

If only … if only….

Read it.

We have the technology. And we’re giving it to the sheep.

Read it.

Hey, they already had the hole dug — seemed a shame to waste it.

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

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Ali Mussa Daqduq, a Lebanese militant, has been held in Iraq for the 2007 killings of five American soldiers, four of whom were captured, tortured and shot execution-style. But now the Iraqi central criminal court has ordered that Daqduq be freed immediately.

Daqduq was in U.S. custody in Iraq and could have been transferred to Guantanamo Bay. But despite our government’s belief, set forth in the extradition request, that Daqduq is a top threat to Americans in the Middle East, President Obama refused to send him to Gitmo. Instead, the Obama administration decided to let an Iraqi court try him. As a result, barring a reversal of the court’s decision, Daqduq will be freed.

Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Ali Mussa Daqduq certainly is.

Read it.

Abandoned and neglected parts of Detroit are quickly becoming dumping grounds for the bodies of murder victims. And authorities acknowledge there’s little they can do.

Well, that’s what decades of Democrat government will do to you….

Read it.

For fans of raw milk and those who, like me—a non-consumer of either raw or pasteurized dairy milk—fight for food freedom in all its forms, the past year or two have been notable for several setbacks on the unpasteurized dairy front.

The FDA has increased pressure on states to crack down on raw milk within their own borders. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently stepped up its efforts against raw milk after the agency claimed its recent analysis “found that the incidence of dairy-associated disease outbreaks caused by nonpasteurized dairy products was 150 times greater per unit consumed than that from pasteurized products.”

So what? Relative incidence isn’t significant unless the absolute numbers of incidents are significant, and there’s no evidence that they are. Neither is there any evidence that these diseases are communicable, failing which it’s difficult to see what business it is of the CDC — or the FDA, so long as the products are clearly labelled (and you can just bet that the FDA would see to that).

Read it.

In recent weeks, there’s been a flurry of articles written on the proposed Marketplace Fairness Act. The Marketplace Fairness Act is a “bipartisan” proposal that would require out-of-state retailers to collect taxes on items sold in states where they have no physical presence. It’s supposed to level the playing field for all involved. Actually, its just a boon for big box retailers who can’t compete in today’s marketplace.

Big business regards the government as a friend, not an enemy, because lobbying can get legislation that, while nominally affecting all players, favors the big guys who can afford the price of compliance better than the little guys. (This is why Warren Buffet doesn’t mind high taxes. However much he pays, your Friendly Local Wannabe Rich Guy winds up worse off.)

What the Act will do is typical of such laws. It will disregard decades of Supreme Court precedent and allow Congress to redefine the playing field thus picking new winners and losers. If you’re having trouble figuring out whom the winners will be, just look at those lobbying for the Act. Generally, it’s the large retailer that’s already nationwide, gets large volume discounts from vendors and that can afford to spend $250k on a tax calculation engine to handle the complex calculations and support a complete tax department to handle the compliance burden and the unions that organize them. But wait, isn’t there a free service to calculate the tax for the retailers? As my Dad says, you get what you pay for.

There are approximately 7,500 state and local tax jurisdictions and the logic required to determine what type of tax and how much to collect is obscene. To say that a retailer with over $500,000 in revenue can comply is insane.

Unfortunately for the local government leeches, the Constitution puts ‘commerce among the several states’ in the hands of the Federal government, which is why interstate shippers have been successful so far in resisting local leech demands to collect state sales and use taxes, and why a Federal law — such as this one — is demanded by those whom it will profit.

Tina Rosenberg, Voice of the Crust, wants to nanny-state you even more than you are already. ‘It’s for the children!’

I’m not going to bother quoting any of her article, because it’s the same old we’re-doing-it-because-you’re-too-stupid-to-know-what’s-good-for-you logic that she would be the first to denounce if opponents of things like abortion or pornography or drugs or whatever the left-wing Neat Thing To Do of the week might be. I’d bet money she’s a huge supporter of Nanny Bloomberg’s attempts to make you Eat Right And Live Straight, by law if necessary.

Hey, I’ve got an idea! Let’s let people run their own lives, alright? If smoking poses no danger to others — and it doesn’t, bogus claims of ‘second-hand smoke’ to the contrary notwithstanding, however annoying it may be to those of us who don’t smoke — then Keep Your Nose Out.

This attitude is a major reason why government-funded (i.e. taxpayer-funded) health care is such a bad idea: Once everybody starts paying for your health care, then everybody thinks they have a right to stick their noses into your health care decisions, even when it’s obviously None Of Their Damned Business. This way lies fascism, and the fact that it’s dressed in a pretty blue-state Democrat Clever Plastic Disguise ought not to fool anybody (except the fools who are pushing it — and those, like the poor, we have always with us).

Steven Mosher explains what modern ‘climate science’ is all about.

The simple point is this: in a PNS situation, the behavior of those doing science changes. To be sure much of their behavior remains the same. They formulate theories; they collect data, and they test their theories against the data. They don’t stop doing what we notional  describe as science. But, as foreshadowed above in the description of how high energy particle physicists behave, one can see how that behavior changes in a PNS situation. There is uncertainty, but the good faith that exists in normal science, the faith that other people are asking questions because they actually want the answer is gone. Asking questions, raising doubts, asking to see proof becomes suspect in and of itself. And those doing science are faced with a question that science cannot answer: Does this person really want the answer or are they a merchant of doubt? Such a question never gets asked in normal science. Normal science doesn’t ask this question because science cannot answer it.

Because values are in conflict the behavior of those doing science changes. In normal science no one would care if Higgs was a Christian or an atheist. No one would care if he voted liberal or conservative; but because two different value systems are in conflict in climate science, the behavior of those doing science changes. They investigate each other. They question motives. They form tribes.  And because the stakes are high the behavior of those doing science changes as well. They protest; they take money from lobby groups on both sides and worse of all they perform horrendous raps on youTube. In short, they become human; while those around them canonize them or demonize them and their findings become iconized or branded as hoaxes.

Read it.

With the euro-crisis threatening the economies of Europe, the United States, and Asia, the usual suspects are coming up for blame. Bankers and corrupt regulators face scorn from the left and much of the right. Yet those perhaps most responsible for the world’s dismal economic future have names many would not recognize. Indeed, the people who have done the most to screw up Europe would be able to walk down almost any street in the world without being recognised. It’s time to meet them!

Time to put a face to some faceless bureaucrats. Europeans invented the modern bureaucratic state, and nobody does it better (or worse, depending on your perspective).

Read it.

After more than a year of applying body-scanning technology without government oversight, the TSA may have to establish some formal rules and procedures for using the machines.

The infamous full-body scanners are used at 19 airports across the country. In 2010 the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a lawsuit challenging the legitimacy of body scanners. The Court of Appeals in the D.C. Circuit ruled the following year that the TSA needed to create some comprehensive rules for body scanner use. And of course the TSA promptly ignored it.

Read it.

 The six-storey mansion on the Avenue Foch of the chic 16th arrondissement, reportedly worth between 100 and 150 million euros, was seized on July 19 in connection with the investigation into Teodorin Obiang, a source close to the inquiry told the AFP news agency.

French judges Roger Le Loire and Rene Grouman, who suspect Teodorin Obiang of using embezzled funds, in July issued an international arrest warrant for the president’s son, four months after beginning proceedings and after he ignored a second summons for questioning.

…

Teodorin Obiang has since May been second vice-president of the oil-rich west African country, which has been ruled with an iron fist since 1979 by his father.

Sheesh — it’s not even profitable to be a corrupt Third-World dictator any more. What’s the world coming to?