Read it.

For the December issue of mental_floss magazine, Jake Rossen managed to do something we thought was impossible—he snagged an interview with the legendary Bill Watterson! Since we’re guessing there are a few Calvin and Hobbes enthusiasts in the audience, we thought we’d provide a glimpse of the e-mail exchange. For our full story on the comic strip, be sure to pick up the print magazine.

Read it.

Hate gerrymandering? We have the technology.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Read it.

This has been a bad week for the Halfrican Queen of D.C. and Princess Harry. They EXPECTED that the owners of the privately-owned businesses that were arbitrarily shut down, the thousands of people that were suddenly unemployed, the parents of the schoolchildren left stranded at school when the Park Service closed the road that their schoolbuses traveled, elderly crippled homeowners given 24 hours to vacate their homes, tourists held under armed guard in Yellowstone National Park, and the thousands of veterans whose entry to their own memorials were blocked would start demanding the blood of the GOP and the TEA Party. They could hardly wait. They even cut off the funds for the families of the people killed in action in a war that Obama escalated but not many knew about because, hey, the media isn’t interested in covering those killed in action due to a DEMOCRAT president. That meant that the families of the dead had to pay their own way to meet the bodies of their wives, husbands, children that were coming home. They were denied death benefits. THAT would surely show the eeeeeevil of the TEA Party and the GOP!

Read it.

Which consistent stupidity since the sixties is one of the reasons I’m no longer a Roman Catholic.

New Ostrich Pillow

Arthritis Pain Relieving Lamp

‘If the Tea Party isn’t pissing someone off, it’s doing it wrong.’ — Jonah Goldberg, The G-File 2013-10-18

Jonah’s whole point is that the notion of defunding Obamacare, while noble and good, was unrealistic given the climate in Washington (which pretty much ignores the climate in the country; Democrats, despite their name, don’t really care what the majority thinks, so long as their base is solidly behind them so that their power is not in danger) — nevertheless, it was a fight worth waging because it shifts the focus in the right direction.

While I think the notion that we wouldn’t be talking about Obamacare were it not for Ted Cruz’s filibuster is simply untrue, the fact that he laid down that marker, and forced everyone in the party to do likewise, will almost certainly work to the Right’s advantage down the road. We can all argue about how unpopular the shutdown really was and how damaged the party brand is, but my guess is that the worst of it has to be behind us. The shutdown will fade from memory while the Obamanation of Obamacare will grow. If you read the Wall Street Journal story today alongside Yuval’s post in the Corner, it’s becoming ever more clear that this is kind of an M. C. Escher drawing of failure. The error pages literally have errors in them. Jonathan Cohn — a passionate Obamacare booster — has a relatively balanced piece about the rollout problems, but he goes back to boosterism when it comes to the issue of premiums. He simply asserts that competition is working and delivering lower premiums. I am at a loss as to how he can know that given that all the reporting I’ve seen suggests that if you’re healthy and middle class, your premiums will likely go up. It even happened to a Daily Kos blogger whose tears are delicious!

Imagine going to Target the day after Thanksgiving for the “Black Friday” sale. You wait for hours or days for the doors to open. You rush in like O. J. Simpson in the old Hertz ads, leaping over pyramids of GI Joes with the Kung Fu Grip, sidestepping the giant Justin Bieber cardboard displays. It’s complete chaos. Some woman who wants the same George Foreman Grill you do punches you in the uvula. You kill a guy with a trident when he tries to get the last Bluetooth beer helmet. Finally, because you kept your head on a swivel, you get your cart to the check-out line and the cashier tells you everything in your cart isn’t on sale, but it’s actually twice as expensive as it would be on a normal day. Why? Because in order to buy the things you want, you have to buy a bunch of stuff you don’t want; a DVD of Bridges of Madison County, a cornucopia of indecipherable feminine products, a top-of-the-line salad spinner, and a twelve-pack of Ensure.

That’s Obamacare for you.

And the fact that the GOP caused a huge fuss that briefly annoyed some people to protest this mess is really not such a bad thing.

Steve Sailer understands the dialectic.

Muslim Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, one of the holiest shrines of Christendom.

Muslims have a long tradition of destroying other people’s property.

Let’s hear it for the Religion of Peace.

Read it.

Since the French-led intervention in Mali began at the beginning of the year Islamist and Tuareg rebels have been pushed back by the French and their allies and Malians voted in a presidential election which, according to the International Center for Counterterrorism, was carried out “without significant violent disturbances.” The intervention has, it seems, been largely successful in ridding Mali of Islamists and displacing Tuareg rebels.

However, there hasn’t been a cholera epidemic, so obviously the U.N. mission is far from over.

Read it. And for sure watch the video.

Yeah, yeah, I know, but I just love these things.

Read it.

Just like GM, the U.S. government has decided to give millions to another part of the auto industry — only this time it’s in Afghanistan.

In fact, a U.S.-led international group spent $230 million on spare vehicle parts for the Afghan National Army and other security agencies — then lost them.

Not knowing where the parts were, the group ordered up an additional $138 million in parts a watchdog said likely aren’t needed and some of which are now sitting in warehouses with boxes stacked to the ceiling.

Baron Bodissey of Gates of Vienna points out that there’s a war on but only one side is fighting.

I’ve written about the information war occasionally in the past. It can be approached from a lot of different angles, but tonight I’d like to focus on just one: the control of the language. This is where the enemy has been phenomenally successful over the past ten or fifteen years. Major Stephen Coughlin has analyzed this process at length. He shows how the patient, methodical infiltration of our government and other institutions by the Muslim Brotherhood has rendered us helpless in the face of the enemy’s “narrative”. They have made us literally unable to describe the threat that faces us, or what is being done to us.

Read it.

What if I told you that now is the perfect time to get that mistress you’ve been daydreaming about since your wife made you sell the red Corvette ragtop?

It’s a fact. TIME reports that sugar-daddy website activity has spiked during the shutdown as nubile young social science grad students look for ways to supplement their income in ways usually left to the federal government. There’s a lot more women “seeking arrangements,” as in the title of one popular website dedicated to such pursuits. Another, called “What’s Your Price” is bit more direct. The latter looks a little “down market,” so choose carefully.

Read it.

The headline read, “We Have Become a Nation of Hamburger Flippers: Dan Alpert Breaks Down the Jobs Report.” Seems that Alpert, the managing partner of New York investment bank Westwood Capital, LLC, was unhappy that most of the jobs created in July were for low-wage workers.

Albert wasn’t alone. Plenty of people have been complaining that most of the recently-created jobs have been for low-wage workers. These people have apparently forgotten who it was that lost jobs in the Great Recession: It was low-wage workers. College educated people were hardly impacted at all, especially those that headed households and had several years of work experience.

The recession hit less educated, and therefore low-wage, workers far more than it hit high-human-capital workers, and the discrepancy persists, even as analysts complain about hamburger-flipping jobs.

And there are a lot more people who can only do burger-flipper jobs than there are highly-educated potential professionals. We don’t need more jobs for the brains in Silicon Valley; we need them for the average Joes on Main Street.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, deals with modern cant.

Modern political discourse consists of little more than the Tinkertoy assembly of cant phrases into speeches: Fix the schools! Out of the shadows! Our brave men and women in uniform! The schools are fine; the “shadow” people are demonstrating in front of TV cameras; and the average American mandarin would faint in horror on hearing that his child had joined the military. Yet still they cant….

…

Practically anything you read or hear about racism, sexism, and homophobia is cant. The most punctilious anti-racists flee like rats from black neighborhoods; the dearth of female mathematicians, in an age when women form an actual majority of college students, is widely understood to be a matter of female preferences, not discrimination; and sensible parents do not leave their kids alone with sexually eccentric adults. Yet the cant goes on.

Read it.

Should government employees have privileges and legal immunities that the rest of us do not have?

Foolish mortal — what makes you think your opinion matters in the slightest?

The government shutdown battle is, in part, a dispute about the extra subsidies members of Congress and their staffs are slated to get from Obamacare.

And guess who won.

Read it.

Read it.

About 900 actors, musicians, authors, architects, and other creative professionals who had been buying their health insurance through The Entertainment Industry Group Insurance Trust will no longer be able to do so because of a provision in ObamaCare.

“They are upset,” said David Rubin, the vice president and corporate secretary of TEIGIT, a Clifton Park, N.Y., health insurance broker that has existed since 1965 but whose business Mr. Rubin said will “fade away” under the new law.

Mr. Rubin noted that in making the case for ObamaCare, the president had repeatedly said that if people like their current employer-provided insurance, they would be able to keep it. “They were told that insurance was going to be unaffected,” he said.

But the Affordable Care Act disallows the single-employee sole-proprietor or husband-and-wife businesses from purchasing policies as employers. “One of the troubling things about this is a lot of mom and pop businesses are no longer considered to be a business,” Mr. Rubin said. “They are being thrown onto the individual exchanges.”

‘If you like your plan, you can keep it.’ Or maybe not.

How’s that Hope & Change workin’ out for ya?

Taki shares his thoughts.

What are the moral responsibilities of liberal democracies in a situation such as the Middle East at present? That’s an easy one. Stay the hell away and let the Saudis and Qataris do the fighting, which is like asking them to be nice to guest workers from Pakistan. My question is: Why is it that I knew what was happening in Syria two and one half years ago, while such brains as Obama and Cameron and Hague and la Clinton were out in left field? Why is it that I knew that extremists who want to erase Syria’s borders and establish a transnational Islamic state were the enemy, while the media and the EU were screaming bloody murder against Assad? Only three weeks ago on The Week, the arse-licker Christiane Amanpour was shouting about democracy and human rights and how we have to intervene in Syria. Andrew Neil was polite, as was Simon Schama, who dared suggest that the mercenaries doing the fighting were not all they pretend to be.

Read it.

• This kind of thing never used to happen. Actually, it used to happen all the time. What’s unusual is the quiet stretch since the last shutdown, when Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton were facing off in 1995. Before that, there were 18 shutdowns in 19 years as various Congresses and presidents squabbled over raising the national debt limit. My personal favorite is the one in 1982, when Congress didn’t feel like working late to pass a spending bill the night before the new fiscal year started. The Republicans were all going to a barbecue at the White House, while the Democrats had a $1,000-a-plate fund-raising dinner to attend.

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A group of wealthy, out-of-state University of Virginia alumni who want to pack the university’s board with like-minded individuals and jack up tuition prices have persuaded Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe to support their cause.

All it took was a $50,000 check.

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

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship.”

Alexander Fraser Tyler, “The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic”

Read it.

Because we have nothing more important to do today.

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A US psychologist has warned of the dire consequences of a “stunning rise” in “vanity” names for kids, revealing that no less than 811 “Messiahs” were proclaimed during 2012, joining 243 Princesses, 588 Princes and a whopping 1,423 Kings on the list of newborns.

Jean Twenge used Social Security data to identify a growing trend among parents to slap their unfortunate sprog with glorious monikers, using infants as “opportunities to show off”, as the New York Post puts it.

Bet most of them are Democrats. Think about it.

Twenge – the co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic – puts this sorry state of affairs down to society’s “increasing vanity”. She said: “From the research literature we know that people who score high in narcissism also score high in trait called ‘need for uniqueness’.?When you get into these name that proclaims the child’s greatness, that takes it to the next level.”

Don’t forget ‘cluelessness’ and ‘viewing kids as fashion accessories rather than actual human beings’.

“Narcissism is toxic to others and to society. Narcissists tend to lack empathy, they tend not to be interested in helping others, they are aggressive when threatened and they take more for themselves and give less for others.

Democrats to a T.

Read it.

And who can blame them? Government welfare programs have been erected on the backs of providers since time out of mind. I’m surprised we have any people willing to practice medicine any more.

John Hinderaker at Powerline has some fun with the arrested-adolescent Left.

This is very funny. A Daily Kos regular gets his Obamacare premium notice and is shocked to learn that as young, healthy people, he and his wife will pay twice as much!

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

The whole POINT of Obamacare was abolition of private catastrophic-only health insurance for the healthy, forcing them to underwrite a double subsidy: a means tested, open-ended premium subsidy for the less affluent covering comprehensive insurance, and a health status subsidy forcing them to subsidize premiums for the sick–irrespective of either of their means!

What did they expect? Weren’t they paying attention? Or maybe it’s like Animal House–but with Obama saying “you f***** up…you trusted us.” LOL!

Couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people.

Sadly, the comments on Daily Kos suggest that most young leftists have still not seen the light. The consensus is that the poster needs to get his mind right. In the old days, it was said that a neoconservative was a liberal who had been mugged by reality. Today’s liberals are apparently so obtuse that they can be mugged by reality–or by Barack Obama–and not notice.

Read it.

Eric Ammann at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and colleagues analysed omega-3 levels in blood samples taken from 2000 women aged 60 to 80. Over six years, the women took tests that measured movement, speech and memory. No difference in cognition was found between women with high and low levels of omega-3 at the start of the study, nor in how quickly cognitive skills declined in people with consistently low or high omega-3 (Neurology, in press).

They do, however, reduce your triglycerides, so eat ’em up.

Read it.

We have featured Pallywood here many times, the Palestinian industry producing everything from outright video hoaxes to mere gross exaggerations all in the name of demonizing Israel.

But there is an even more pernicious western media version of Pallywood, the outright bias and misleading characterization of acts of terror against Israel.

These actions often are deliberate provocations set up by media and activists who side with the Palestinians, in which a phalanx of photographers and videographers waits to catch an Israeli soldier responding to a provocation.  The use of children as provocateurs is a common tactic — nothing plays better in the media than the image of an Israeli soldier confronting a child.

But those children often are engaged in violent behavior, particularly rock throwing.  A “rock” can shatter a skull, or in where thrown at a moving vehicle, can cause a serious accident.

To the media, rock throwing is no big deal.  Because the media has not been on the receiving end.

There’s a reason why ‘stoning’ is a form of execution.

Read it.

Oops, too late….

 Remind your parents not to send you to public school. Bill Gates went to Lakeside, Seattle’s most exclusive prep school where tuition in 1967 was $5,000 (Harvard tuition that year was $1760). Typical classmates included the McCaw brothers, who sold the cellular phone licenses they obtained from the U.S. Government to AT&T for $11.5 billion in 1994. When the kids there wanted to use a computer, they got their moms to hold a rummage sale and raise $3,000 to buy time on a DEC PDP-10, the same machine used by computer science researchers at Stanford and MIT.

And that’s advice we can all appreciate.

 Note: Recall that in the 1980s we venerated Donald Trump and studied his “art of the deal”. If Donald Trump had taken the millions he inherited from his father and put it all into mutual funds, you’d never have had to suffer through one of his books. But he’d be just about as rich today.

And that’s all you really need to know about getting rich.

Read it.

On the evening of Feb. 12, 2007, a young Muslim man walked into the Trolley Square mall in Salt Lake City with a pistol-grip, 12-gauge shotgun and a 38-caliber revolver and opened fire on shoppers, killing five and wounding four others, including a pregnant woman.

Police say he “sought to kill as many people as possible.” He had a backpack full of ammunition, enough firepower to massacre dozens of innocent people. But fortunately, an off-duty cop returned fire and eventually, with the help of other police, put an end to the terrorist’s life and grand plans.

Sounds like Kenya needs some strict gun control laws. That would prevent such tragedies, as they do in D.C., Boston, L.A., and Chicago.

Wouldn’t want the place to wind up like Texas.

Twice as many people were killed at the Utah mall than the Boston Marathon. Yet the attack garnered few national headlines.

Well, you know, Boston is a Real (coastal) City, whereas Utah is just Flyover Country, and nobody who is Anybody cares about that.

Local media wrote it off as the act of a madman, parroting the quick conclusion of law enforcement.

Officially, the FBI declared the mass shooting was not an act of terrorism.

“We were unable to pin down any particular motive,” said Tim Fuhrman, then-special agent in charge of the bureau’s field office in Salt Lake City. “Unfortunately, his motivations went to the grave with him.”

Did they?

As early as 2004, police were called to Talovic’s school after it was discovered that he was looking at Tek-9 semiautomatic firearms on the Internet and boasting that his “grandfather was in the jihad.”

It was a reference to the 1990s holy war between Bosnian Muslims and Christian Serbs in which his grandfather was reportedly killed.

Apparently, Talovic had prepared for his own martydom. He told a friend before the attack that “tomorrow is going to be the happiest day of my life, but it will happen only once.”

“One interpretation of this statement is that Talovic was happy that he was going to be a shahid — that he would be committing jihad and go to paradise,” according to a July 2, 2007, electronic communication from the Salt Lake City field office to the counterterrorism division of the FBI.

Well, obviously no connection. Guess his motives will just remain a puzzle.

Read it.

That’s because you’re all white males and so are the Designated Punching Bag. If you were black (Hey, Eric Holder!) or female (Hey, Kathleen Sibelius!) or, better yet, black and female (Hey, Valerie Jarrett!), you’d have all the support you could desire.

Better get to work on that.

Read it.

You know they don’t have the balls to use them for executions. So it’s probably for testing vegetables or something.

Read it.

What’s wrong with Kansas, as Thomas Friedman so famously asked? Well, it keeps electing people like Bob Dole and Kathleen Sibelius, who then go on to blight the entire country with their presence.

Speaking of resignations, how about Barack Obama? As I recall, this whole fiasco was his idea in the first place. (Oh, right, I forgot — he’s a congenital narcissist who wouldn’t give up office if his children’s lives depended on it….)

Read it.

There was a major break in the Shutdown Crisis earlier today. President Obama agreed to meet with House Republicans after the Republican leadership announced that it had joined Al Qaeda.

White House Spokesman Jay Carney announced: “Now we have someone we can talk with.”

Read it.

The US military secretly used a variety of tactics to break the resolve of the Guantánamo Bay hunger strikers, including placing them in solitary confinement if they continued to refuse food, newly declassified interviews with detainees reveal.

Oh, let us weep for the poor terrorists oppressed at Gitmo. Perhaps we ought to do that they do, beat and behead their prisoners.

The key to handling a ‘hunger strike’ is let them starve; their choice, their consequences. Western governments are too soft-hearted to keep their citizens secure, as Gandhi discovered and exploited brilliantly — if the French, Germans, or Italians had been ruling India, he’d have been dead by the side of the road with a bullet in his head the first time he tried any of that shit, and the world would have been saved a lot of mawkish foolishness.

Read it.

The problem is the plan closest to what he has now will mean a 24 percent increase over his current payment– after subsidies.

And his co-pay for emergency room visits almost tripled — from $125 to $350 — an important factor for a family with two young boys.

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

How do these fools keep believing that getting the government involved in something is going to lower prices? When has that ever happened?

Read it.

Deception #1: universal coverage

Deception #2: no new taxes on the middle class

Deception #3: annual premium savings of $2,500

Deception #4: no increase in the deficit

Deception #5: you can keep your plan if you like it

Read it.

Democrats may push the line that it’s Republicans holding the government hostage in the current partial shutdown, but Democrats caught in the crossfire don’t feel that way. Yesterday, DC’s mayor Vincent Gray, a Democrat, confronted Harry Reid over Democrats’ refusal to agree to a Republican measure that would fund Washington’s municipal government during the shutdown. Reid responded by telling Gray he was on his side and not to “screw it up.”

DC’s House delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, meanwhile, reportedly confronted President Obama at a meeting he had with House Democrats at the White House yesterday.

When Obama starts humpin’, ain’t nobody safe.

Oyster

NeverWet

Mounted Hand Light

Read it.

What was once expected only of DailyKos or crazy fringe left-wing websites, now is mainstream liberal media.

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

Heads are still shaking about the unspeakable cruelty of Shirley Sherrod suing Susie Breitbart, a widow with four kids, as a substitute defendant for her late husband, because Sherrod blames Andrew Breitbart for her ouster from the Department of Agriculture.

Tom Vilsack demanded Sherrod’s resignation in July 2010 because Democrat political operatives at the White House panicked after Breitbart released the video of an NAACP audience’s enthusiastic approval of Sherrod’s story about how she denied assistance to a white farmer. The political panic occurred after that video got played in edited form on a Fox News broadcast, but Breitbart was not responsible for how Fox News depicted the story, nor was he responsible for Tom Vilsack acting as a political hatchet-man.

Read it.

In the early days of the Obama administration, Michael Barone wrote in connection with the fleecing of bondholders courtesy of the Obama administration in the Chrysler bankruptcy: “We have just seen an episode of Gangster Government. It is likely to be a continuing series.” In the current production of Shutdown Theater we have an episode of Gangster Government for the little people.

Read it.

MIT researchers recently pulled on a piece of cracked metal so hard that they expected it to break apart. Instead, something unexpected happened: The crack healed.

Read it.

    1) As to those in the World Trade Center…Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. …If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it. — Ward Churchill, University of Colorado at Boulder

2) Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents. — Bill Ayers, University of Illinois at Chicago

3) The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military…I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus. — Nicholas De Genova, Columbia University

4) There are some circumstances, for example, where the newborn baby is severely disabled and where the parents think that it’s better that child should not live, when killing the newborn baby is not at all wrong … not like killing the chimpanzee would be. — Peter Singer, Princeton

5) Real freedom will come when [U.S.] soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors. — John Daly, Warren County Community College

Try to guess how many are paid with your tax dollars.

Read it.

A man flashed a gun several times on a crowded commuter train in San Francisco, but passengers were so absorbed in their phones and tablets they didn’t notice until he randomly shot and killed a university student, authorities said.

Boy, it’s a good thing San Francisco has all those strict gun control laws, or the place would wind up like Texas or something.

Read it.

Criticize Christianity? Not a problem. Criticize Islam? See you in court.

Read it.

A prototype of a 3D printer that makes pizza showed up at the SXSW Eco conference in Austin this week. The pizza isn’t quite at the stage where it can make a pizza from scratch, but it is capable of extruding dough, sauce and cheese and in a pizza-like shape and then cooking it. NASA is interested in the technology, which could allow astronauts to choose from a greater variety of meals and cut down on waste.

We have the technology.