Read it. (That’s for a fashionably sufficient expansive definition of ‘British’, of course.)

Tony Blair’s party was working from the same playbook as Ted Kennedy’s party: Immigrants need social services (i.e. handouts) and the Left are the party of handouts, so let ’em all in and they’ll vote for us forever. It worked for the 19th century, it worked for the 20th century, and it’ll probably work for the 21st century as well.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. If Obama gets re-elected, it’s a sure thing.

Read it.

I was going through a litany of favorite left-wing issues, categorizing them according to how they meshed up with what I perceived to be three primary base human impulses. Those three impulses being: Resentment, desire for a centrally controlled and micro-managed nanny-state, and belief in a godless universe. Abortion is godless, not only in the act, but in the beliefs upon which it is based. The baby is “tissue.” To those who then ask, if the baby is nothing more than a clump of cells and the rest of us labor under no moral obligation to preserve it, then how are any of the rest of us more worthy of protection than that “tissue”? And the honest answer is: We’re not! Boys, girls, gays, straights, babies, old people, every year in between we’re all just randomly growing and regenerating carbon-based stuff. Stuck here on a tiny rock in space by unplanned cosmic forces. Nothing glorious about us at all. Certainly no reason for being here, no mission, no purpose. Just sit around and be happy. Play a video game and chow down a Happy Meal. Do whatever pleases you.

Read it.

Oh, pick pick pick….

Adding another wild-card to the 2012 campaign’s final days, a former aide to Vice President Joe Biden has written a tell-all Washington memoir in which he lacerates the former Delaware senator as an “egomaniacal autocrat” who was “determined to manage his staff through fear.”

That’s the most positive thing I’ve heard about Biden in decades. Perhaps I’ve misjudged the man.

Read it.

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

Read it.

I knew that Monopoly — the board game, not the economic concept — had evolved from a game designed to promote the ideas of the 19th-century radical Henry George. Now, thanks to a link in Christopher Ketcham’s Harper’s feature on the game’s history, I’ve seen this site, featuring photos of the boards used in different versions of the Landlord’s Game, as the Georgist version and its early successors were often known.

Hey, it’s Bill Gates, so it’s gotta be true….

Read it. And watch the video.

At Friday prayers last week, Mohammed Morsi — a “moderate Islamist” and friend of President Barack Hussein Obama — joined in a prayer for the destruction of the Jews.

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

What peaceful, friendly people! Don’t you just wish you had some for neighbors?

Of course, we’re not Jews, so there’s no problem, right?

Still waiting for someone to explain to me how this lot are an improvement over Mubarrak….

Read it.

A new Center for Responsive Politics analysis out this week shows that despite President Obama slipping in the polls, he still has the love of many employees of the biggest players in Washington, D.C.: Google, Microsoft, Lawyers and Lobbying Firms.

Google, which has maintained a long, close relationship with the President and his team is, together with Microsoft, one of the top three employers of donors to his re-election campaign.

Unfortunately, there’s a major difference between smart and wise.

Another notable source of donations to Obama: Lawyers and employees of lobbying firms.

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

Despite Obama’s ban on taking donations from registered federal lobbyists, he still raked in $59,252 last month from those employed by lobbying firms and state-level lobbyists– setting a new record for monthly donations from the lobbying sector to the President’s re-election campaign.

Yet another Obama promise broken. No news here.

Freeberg reinvents Nietzsche.

I reflect on it for a few days and a few nights, and realize I can’t think of any political agenda, in my lifetime, leftward-leaning that doesn’t have something to do with resentment.

Nietzsche, being an academic intellectual, uses the fancy French term ressentiment, but it’s the same tune.

Ressentiment is not to be considered interchangeable with the normal English word “resentment”, or even the French “ressentiment”. While the normal words both speak to a feeling of frustration directed at a perceived source, neither speaks to the special relationship between a sense of inferiority and the creation of morality.

Read it.

No wonder our ancestresses decided to interbreed with them….

Read it.

Grandmothers are the secret behind humans’ living such long lives compared to our near relatives the apes, a computer simulation has revealed.

Read it.

While you at it, I’d like a pony and a new iPad.

Read it.

With results as you see them. Just sayin’.

Read it.

In theory, regulation should arise as a response to market failures. In practice, regulation is more accurately characterized as a government tool for redistributing society’s resources toward those groups that have successfully enlisted the support of the government on their behalf.

For example, the 50 biggest-spending lobbying groups spent $176 million on lobbying from July through September this year. If agencies weren’t cranking out 3,800 new rules per year, and if the Code of Federal Regulations wasn’t 169,000 pages long, it is unlikely that so much money would flow into Washington.

Steve Sailer does it better than most.

 I’d have some specific criticisms of Gopnik’s essay, but it’s really much better than the average, so you owe it to yourself to read it. My impression is of an urban Ashkenazi intellectual groping in good faith to recover some knowledge and wisdom lost when people without much connection to land came to dominate highbrow discourse.

Just sayin’.

Freebergnails it, as he so often does.

See, I have this belief about assholes: We can disagree about whether or not a specific person is one, or is behaving like one within a defined setting as we evaluate some defined behavior of his, with reasonable points presented on both sides of such a disagreement. Right up until the individual is trying to be one. Asshole-ish-ness gets an automatic A for effort; if you’re working at it, it really doesn’t matter what the achievement is. People manage to do asshole things all the time without characteristically behaving like assholes, or without the personality deficiencies of assholes, but you don’t apply yourself toward asshole effort unless you’re an asshole.

Yes, that applies to sitting United States Presidents. What an asshole! “We have these things called aircraft carriers…”

One of the things that the debate brought out is that Obama really is an arrogant ass. See, if you’re running for President, and you’re in a public debate that supposedly demonstrates your qualifications for that job, you don’t talk to your opponent in a voice dripping with contempt as if his comment were beneath your notice. (Well, maybe if it’s Jimmy Carter. But otherwise: no.) I do my best to avoid looking at Obama but I’m sure he was rolling his eyes as he said it.

Mull this statement over in your mind a minute or two, and it becomes clear: Some teenager at heart, having successfully used elaborate Marxist rhetoric to get out of garbage-hauling duty for the entirety of his young, snot-nosed existence, managed to bullshit His way into the White House. That is a problem, and by no means a small one.

And that is the basic flaw with Obama. He needs to grow up. He needs to approach life in an adult manner. He needs to act like the President of the United States, not just the Homecoming King.

Even disregarding the ideological spectrum, this is precisely what I do not want to see in the Oval Office, this swaggering hipster can’t-be-told-anything mentality.

That’s what this election is all about: Putting the adults back in charge, and sending the Bros back to the frat house.

Read it.

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

I prefer the traditional term FNG.

Undoubtedly, the school will now call for the city name to be changed, since Chapel Hill sounds too Christian.

No doubt that’s the next step.

Read it.

If you’re not having much luck with traditional dating sites and you’re not a hardcore Star Trek fan, what’s a smart single gal to do? If you’re Noriko Higashi, a programmer at a social gaming company, you post a request for a boyfriend on the social coding platform GitHub. Gotta play to your target audience, right?

We have the technology.

Read it.

Everything you think you know about ‘insurance’ is probably wrong.

An insurance policy is an agreement to turn the possibility of an improbable unaffordable expense into a certain affordable expense. It is not a magic means of making a certain expense affordable.

For example, paying for birth control is highly probable. Needing vaccines or some medical tests is highly probable. Living long enough to retire is highly probable nowadays (although it wasn’t back when old-age pensions were invented). An “insurance” policy that pays for such things is, at best, a matter of taking your money for a wild night out on the town and giving some of it back to you.

Read it.

A young Beluga whale spent four years apparently trying to speak English recently, according to scientists in California. The cetacean’s enunciation was apparently clear enough that it was actually discovered when the creature ordered a startled diver to get out of the water.

Read it.

I bet you didn’t know that.

The shocking news.

I always thought that he belonged in a museum, myself.

Read it.

The International Cycling Union announced Monday that Armstrong is being stripped of his Tour de France titles.

And yet he still won the races — a historical fact. How are they going to get around that? The Ministry of Truth doesn’t yet have an effective Memory Hole, much as the International Crust might wish they had one available.

“The UCI has tested Lance Armstrong 218 times. If Lance Armstrong was able to beat the system, then the responsibility for addressing that rests not only with the UCI but also with” the anti-doping agencies that accepted the results, the cycling union said in its statement.

Ann Althouse brings up an interesting point:

 Shouldn’t the UCI be stripped of something for missing the evidence? I’d like damages for all the time I’ve wasted paying attention to this sport. If all those races are now to be understood as phony, all of the money that anybody made promoting and presenting this sport was a big fraud. Stripping Armstrong of his titles doesn’t restore what we’ve lost.

Actually, I’m inclined to believe Armstrong over some semi-government agency. Their statements sound like the classic mentally-deranged conspiracy theory: ‘The fact that we found no evidence of doping merely underlines the insidious nefarious nature of his evil plot!’

Read it. Then read it again.

 The unprincipled exception is a non-liberal value or assertion, not explicitly identified as non-liberal, that liberals use to escape the inconvenient, personally harmful, or suicidal consequences of their own liberalism without questioning liberalism itself.

Alternatively, the unprincipled exception is a non-liberal value or assertion, not explicitly identified as non-liberal, that conservatives use to slow the advance of liberalism or to challenge some aspect of liberalism without challenging liberalism itself.

Read it.

 The United States had an unmanned Predator drone over its consulate in Benghazi during the attack that slaughtered four Americans — which should have led to a quicker military response, it was revealed yesterday.

“They stood, and they watched, and our people died,” former CIA commander Gary Berntsen told CBS News.

The anarchists who want us not to have any government at all may be getting their wish. No wonder they all support Obama.

Heh.

 The study randomly assigned 5,145 overweight or obese people with Type 2 diabetes to either a rigorous diet and exercise regimen or to sessions in which they got general health information. The diet involved 1,200 to 1,500 calories a day for those weighing less than 250 pounds and 1,500 to 1,800 calories a day for those weighing more. The exercise program was at least 175 minutes a week of moderate exercise.

But 11 years after the study began, researchers concluded it was futile to continue — the two groups had nearly identical rates of heart attacks, strokes and cardiovascular deaths.

Check it out.

This won’t mean much to anybody who hasn’t had to box a compass, but it’s still pretty slick.

Read it.

The statement claimed the information in the textbooks about Greek democracy might be “too detailed” for students to comprehend and that references to freedom of belief and religion should be removed because “it suggests to younger students that they could choose any religion they wanted,” according to the article.

But remember, of course, that the real problem is Islamophobia.

Read it.

This has got to be a hoax or a setup. I refuse to believe that a Democrat candidate for political office would engage in so entrepreneurial an activity.

Read it.

Anything that affirms your feelings about your own morality (“I eat organic, therefore I’m a good person.”) your brain may subconsciously use to justify doing something immoral. (“I’m generally a very good person so it’s okay if every now and then I…”)

Related question: Does being a jerk already make it more likely that you prefer organic food? I think there’s a lot of empirical evidence that would support an affirmative response to that.

Read it.

The best education in the world is already free of charge. Just go to the best university in the world and start attending classes. Stay as long as you want, and study everything that interests you. No one will ever “card” you. The only problem is that, no matter how much you learn, there won’t be any record you were ever there.

Universities don’t sell education, they sell credentials. But that’s okay, because employers don’t care about education, they care about credentials. ‘The way she sees and the way he looks, it’s a perfect match.’

Read it.

Funny thing how ‘populists’ always have schemes that involve the government oppressing people, as if that sort of thing will never, ever come back to bite them in the butt.

What’s a mother to do?

My daughter has repeatedly brought home books from the school library that I have a problem with. I’m a feminist and I’m anti-censorship. I’m lost.

I can well believe that.

 Yesterday, for the THIRD time, LittleTaff brought home a fairy tale… this time Rapunzel. Objectified women with little or no agency, basing marriage decisions on the appearance or wealth of the men, and WITCHES!!!!

I know a number of people who consider themselves ‘witches’. All of them are deep-dyed left wing. So I’m not sure what the complaint is, here. I suppose it would be worse if it had (gasp) Christians in it. Still….

 I did do some reconnaissance and go to the Feminist Bookshop in Sydney this morning…. but they’ve closed down. I really need a feminist parent reality check/pep talk.

What you really need is a brain that isn’t steeped in ‘progressive’ brain-wash. Unfortunately the supply-chain is very low on that these days.

Read it.

 Baroness Cox told the House of cases she had encountered including a woman who had been admitted to hospital by her violent husband who had left her for another woman but still denied her a religious divorce so she could remarry.

Another woman was forced to travel to Jordan to seek permission to remarry from a seven-year-old boy whom she had never met because she had no other male relatives, she said.

A third who came to see her was so scared of being seen going in that she hid behind a tree whole another told her: “I feel betrayed by Britain, I came to this country to get away from all this but the situation is worse here than in my country of origin.”

Baroness Cox said: “These examples are just the tip of an iceberg as many women live in fear, so intimidated by family and community that they dare not speak out or ask for help.”

But remember, the real problem is Islamophobia.

Read it.

How about the repeated efforts by Obama to publicly humiliate Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? And the time Obama stated that Israel should return to the suicidal pre-1967 borders? Or the elision from the 2012 Democratic platform of some key elements from the 2008 platform, namely that Israel was the strongest US ally in the Middle East, that Hamas should be isolated from being a partner in the peace process, that the bogus Palestinian right to return should be opposed.  Or the refusal to name Jerusalem the capital of Israel, and the absolute unwillingness to condemn Arab terrorism.

The view of the Transnational Crust has always been that Israel is a ‘shitty little country‘ and they wish it would just go away — and if that means a massacre of  current Israelis by Arab terrorists, well, they aren’t going to lose any sleep over it.

Read it.

Explosions and gun battles between suspected Islamist extremists and security forces hit northeastern Nigeria, leaving several people dead and buildings destroyed in one city, officials and residents said Friday.

The clashes sparked panic and chaos in the city of Potiskum from late Thursday, with residents reporting a number of dead as well as schools and a government building set on fire.

In Maiduguri, the base of Islamist extremist group Boko Haram, gunfire and several explosions could also be heard on Friday, but details were not immediately clear.

Police said they were seeking to restore calm in Potiskum and clear unexploded bombs, while some of the ordnance was still detonating.

But remember, the real problem is Islamophobia.

Read it.

The Des Moines Register reports that for five years ending in February 2011, the Iowa Civil Rights Commission shook down landlords for “voluntary contributions” in exchange for dropping discrimination complaints. The Register obtained copies of 27 settlement agreements involving about $20,000 in contributions. Unlike money from fines, which end up in the state’s general fund, the donations went directly to the commission, creating “the impression that justice is for sale,” as state court administrator David Boyd puts it. The commission ended the practice after Winterset attorney Mark Smith questioned its propriety.

Read it.

The bombing, near the headquarters of a Christian party, the Phalange, comes at a time of high tensions and divisions in Lebanon as a result of the conflict in neighbouring Syria.

But remember, the chief problem is Islamophobia.

Read it.

Roughly 100 million people—one-third of the U.S. population—receive aid from at least one means-tested welfare program each month. Average benefits come to around $9,000 per recipient. If converted to cash, means-tested welfare spending is more than five times the amount needed to eliminate all poverty in the United States.

Which just goes to show that eliminating poverty — or even seriously reducing it — is not the actual goal of government welfare spending, popular mythology to the contrary notwithstanding. The obvious goal of government welfare spending is to hire and pay government workers, and to reduce enough Americans to abject dependence on government welfare spending to ensure that government workers will continue to be hired and paid.

Read it.

When I first saw this guys picture, my immediate thought was ‘OMG! Somebody tried to electrocute Mayor Bloomberg, and the only result was that it caused him to spit out the lemon he’s been sucking on all these years!’ Imagine my disappointment when I found out that it was someone else entirely.

Read it.

The Diocese of South Carolina announced on Wednesday (Oct. 17) that it has disaffiliated from the Episcopal Church, escalating a long-running skirmish and setting the stage to become the fifth diocese to secede from the denomination.

Like watching a snowman melt in the sun.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Can’t say that I blame them.

Read it.

Read it.

 Maneesh Sethi placed an advert on the classified website Craigslist to recruit someone willing to monitor what he was looking at on his laptop.

The computer expert and writer, from San Francisco, now pays a female employee $8 (£5) an hour to strike him in the face if she spots him wasting time on social media.

Mr Seethi claims the unusual motivational system has helped him boost his productivity from just 35 per cent to around 98 per cent during the working day.

I suspect that he has larger issues than ‘productivity’.

Read it.

The company is developing an alternative to chemical-intensive agriculture, which is both expensive and hazardous to the environment. With advanced computer vision techniques for identifying weeds and selectively killing unwanted plants, Blue River Technology’s equipment is much faster and more efficient than traditional methods of weed killing. Known as “Lettuce-bot”, this machine is particularly well-suited to organic agriculture and fields with chemical-resistant weeds.

During tests, this automated system gathered over a million images as it moved through the fields. Its Computer Vision System was able to detect and segment individual plants – even those that were touching each other – with 98% accuracy.

We almost have the technology.

Read it.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Of course, the use of ‘Robin Hood’ here is bogus, as most such uses are. Robin Hood TOOK MONEY FROM CORRUPT GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS AND GAVE IT BACK TO WORKING PEOPLE WHO’D HAD IT STOLEN THROUGH TAXES. Nobody ever seems to remember it correctly.

When Steve Sailer does a takedown, he doesn’t hold back.

 Some celebrated thinkers are so dumb that even when they are more or less right in their politics, they drive the thinking man crazy with their amazing ability to come up with stupid examples for what ought to be easy positions to validate. MIT economist Daron Acemoglu is making himself the Malcolm Gladwell of the 2010s, with a nearly infallible nose for sniffing out the worst possible argument and then putting it forward triumphantly.

Now, I know nothing about Daron Acemoglu (other than that he’s Turkish, as his name makes clear), but this almost tempts me to look him up.

Read it. And watch the video … if you dare.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees.

But ya gotta love Australians.