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Give President Obama credit when he’s right

Rand Simberg published a piece today (on NRO) calling out NRO for failing to give the Obama Administration credit for its change of policy re NASA.
It’s long past time for conservatives to recognize that NASA is a bloated and ineffectual bureaucracy wedded to insanely expensive stunts – stunts that it can’t even accomplish reliably. For forty [...]

Treat every intersection like a four way stop

This just in from the Department of Unintended Consequences:
LED traffic lights have saved the city of Green Bay “thousands of dollars per month” because they use less electricity than incandescent lights. That sounded like a great deal, until winter came and people couldn’t see the lights because snow and ice built up on them. LED lights, being [...]

Another “act of senseless violence”

The other day a forty-six year old cultural anthropology student apparently carried out some very successful field work in applied cultural anthropology when he murdered a professor at Birmingham University. But the university’s president seems determined to deny him credit for his work.
In what can only be seen as an example of reflexive bias, BU [...]

Some good news, Europe may be waking up

The numinously neutral and peaceful Swiss have voted 57.5 to 42.5 to ban the erection of more minarets in their country. Great news which Daniel Pipes thinks may validate the support of realistic policies inhibiting the spread of practical submission to Islam in the rest of Europe.
There is certainly a significant element of racism (or whatever we’re [...]

Madness

We can’t count on our enemies being stupid. Some of them have learned from the reaction Osama Bin Laden provoked with the 9/11 attack. They’ve realized that quiet and persistent subversion is a far better strategy than open warfare.
Part of me thinks the populations of countries that adopt Sharia Law will find it stifles growth [...]

Why wasn’t Hassan discouched?

Mark Steyn points out that Major Nidal Hassan repeatedly urged his army superiors to start criminal investigations of his patients based on supposed facts he teased out in confidential psychiatric sessions. His superiors ho-hummed and haw-hemmed even though he signed his emails “Praise be to Allah” which sounds like an odd way to end a [...]

When he’s good he’s good

Ah! Mark Steyn. When he’s good he’s very good indeed:
PALIN: How many AP fact-checkers does it take to change a lightbulb?
FACT: Palin has gone seriously “rogue” in her facts here. AP fact-checkers are prevented per union regulations from changing lightbulbs.
AP writers Matt Apuzzo, Sharon Theimer, Tom Raum, Rita Beamish, Beth Fouhy, H. Josef Hebert, Justin [...]

Khalid, Khalid, burning bright

A few years ago at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago I learned that the playful porpoises one sees at shows are sad shadows of wild untamed porpoises. They aren’t even really porpoises, they’re mere automata, cynically reprogrammed into performing machines. The regimen they endure is arguably more relentless and exacting than that imposed to make the  inmates at Guantanamo Bay [...]

Buffett’s big bet

Roger Pielke noticed Warren Buffett’s big bet on coal the other day and wondered what the Sage of Omaha knows.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/11/warren-buffetts-big-bet.html
As it happens my son sent me a long DOE report the other day that made me think things aren’t as bad as I had thought even if global warming fears are wholly reasonable. Or perhaps [...]

Hope and promised Change versus Naked Theft and the prospect of some Change

Robert Heinlein on our present predicament.
“Reform politicians not only tend to be dishonest but stupidly dishonest – whereas the business politician is honest. . .
“I don’t mean the business politician won’t steal; stealing is his business. But all politicians are nonproductive. The only commodity any politician has to offer is jawbone. His personal integrity – [...]

Sycophancy on parade

A Yale educated sycophant named Rocco Landesman made a fool of himself the other day. Based on what he said in his address of October 21st to the Grantsmakers in the Arts he would have better spent his time and money studying wrestling at Bobo Brazil University rather than Drama at Yale. Mr. Landesman is [...]

Those idiots down in Washington can’t even carve pork intelligently

Mark Twain famously said, “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.”
Well. . . we’ve just had an example of the liberals in congress passing out pork so stupidly that they gave far more to their opponents than to their supporters.
According to analysis at The Audacious Epigone [...]

You break it, you own it

Colin Powell and Richard Armitage famously cited the Pottery Barn rule in talking about intervention into the affairs of other countries – “You break it, you own it.”
It seems to me that application of a corollary of that rule is a cure for one big problem that ails our current health care insurance system.
Currently, under [...]

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