Maggie's Farm

Unanimity on global warming: Samizdata, Tangled Web, YARGB, and Maggie's Farm agree that the Stern Report, and the warming hysteria in general, is a government play for money and power. Now that people in the West are so relatively secure and prosperous, the socialists need a fresh angle.

In the mood for more Soros dirt? Atlas

Laptops for wounded soldiers. Info at Sisu

"John Kerry said WHAT?" Incredible. Michelle

The top earning dead celebs. Businesspundit.

Men spend six months of their lives ogling females. Is that all? (h/t, Carnival of the Insanities)

Snoopie with the Jihad Christmas. Tasteless!

Are we finished with tolerance yet? The decapitated 12 year old. LGF. I have no doubt that this is killing for the pure fun of it.

Can angels see the color green? Platonic forms, and God. Evangelical Outpost

The almost-dead buck: We posted this a year ago, but Howler reminds us of this goofy trick. Rather hilarious.

Amnesty Int. gets one thing right: Protect the internet from governments - and the UN.

Kirsten Powers understands an important concept. From a piece about Andrew Sullivan, about whom everyone always is talking (for no reason I can understand):

It is a common criticism today that if you divine your truth from the Bible, that is unacceptable. But if you divine your truth from your own internal dialogue or from talking to friends or from a philosophy other than that which is found in the Bible, then that truth is okay. The criticism of devout Christians is founded on a faulty premise: that non-Christians come to conclusions about what they believe without the influence of some sort of philosophical teaching. Even atheism is in itself a philosophy. It's based on the premise that humans are random occurrences and that there is no higher moral power. But since that doesn't come from the Bible, it's considered "objective" and developing public policy based on that view is acceptable. Or Sullivan's brand of Christianity -- that interprets the Bible in a looser fashion -- is held up as being "objective" which of course it is not. Sullivan is just as fundamentalist in his view of the world as any fundamentalist Christian. They just have different conclusions.

Plenty of people are uninformed and make decisions based on what their friends think or party identification, and there is precious little conversation about how the public discourse is being destroyed by uninformed, lazy people who spend all their time watching Fear Factor and The Bachelor (which in my opinion is closer to the truth) and a seemingly constant conversation about how fundamentalist or evangelical Christians are the root of all the problems in the political system.

There must be a separation of church and state, for we are not, nor should we be a theocratic state. But a religious person has as much right to make a voting decision based on their faith in God as an atheist person has a right to make their voting decision based on their belief that there is no God.

Image above: Edvard Munch's "Vampire"

Another good reason not to run marathons.

Stop The Mercedes? Blair

Down at the bottom of a world full of lies: French news. No Pasaran

Why Dems are losing the culture wars: USA Today

Is boot-licking dead? It deserves another chance. Reasoned Audacity

Ace liked Prestige. Might have to actually go to a movie.

What he said: (Gay Patriot):

While they’re campaigning on banalities and bromides, the Democrats are keeping their real agenda hidden from voters. For, if they make that public, they’d make it clear to voters that they haven’t changed since the American people voted them out of power in 1994. As the Journal puts it: “A Democratic triumph would produce a major shift in the national policy debate, and we can understand why Ms. Pelosi isn’t plastering most of this agenda on billboards around the country.”

To see the type of agenda we’d expect from a Democratic Congress, read the Journal’s piece. And you’ll understand why the Democrats have been keeping their focus on the GOP — and neglecting to campaign on their own agenda.

The Camille Paglia piece, a quote via Clayton:

What do contemporary intellectuals have to offer anyhow? What passionate engagement do they have to appeal to young people? Liberal secularism has become bourgeois and materialistic. It's snide, elitist, and politically marginalized. The chattering class clearly has no effect whatever on decision-making in Washington. Conservative radio hosts have been claiming that liberal criticism of Bush's decisiveness in invading Iraq mirrors the shilly-shallying of 1930s intellectuals during Hitler's rise. The intellectuals, with their cultivated internationalism, always counsel procrastination and leave it to the men of action to deal forcefully with fascist regimes.

Image: Hope this witch comes trick-or-treating to all of you (single) fellows tomorrow night.

White trash in Europe? You bet. Der Spiegel, (via A&L Daily). Laziness, fast foods, cigarettes and beer...and excellent social benefits.

How nerdy are you? Test here. (h/t, Mr. Free Market)

Hiding the cross at William and Mary. Michelle. YARGB wonders whether they want to make sure that the chapel is welcoming to vampires. In seriousness, though, what is more welcoming to all people than a cross?

"I never had energy independence with that woman." Flat-out lies from Clinton.

Faith and Reason. Dinocrat. With a link to Godel's proof of God's existence.

School board member speaks the truth, without realizing it. Coyote

From a piece at Atlas, with a killer quote:

The invaluable Brussels Journal recently translated an interview with the writer Oscar van den Boogaard from the Belgian paper De Standaard. A Dutch gay “humanist” (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool), Mr. van den Boogaard was reflecting on the accelerating Islamification of the Continent and concluding that the jig was up for the Europe he loved. “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

Jerry Lee Lewis on YouTube.

The dark side of environmentalism. Trailer of the movie at Samizdata.

I'll take one of these and one of those. Twins with different colors. AOL news

Astonishing pool trick shots. Eight ball san at RTLC

The Big Pharaoh raped a girl, but he has an excuse.

Is multiculturalist submission reaching a dead end in the UK? TCS

NYT working overtime to defeat Joe Lieberman. Sister Toldjah

The states, by ideological impact. Willisms

Auster is fed up with the Admin's approach to Iraq:

So, Steyn’s question should not have been, “Where is the offense in all this?” His question should have been, “Where is the strategy that can lead to victory?” And that would have brought the president up short. He would have started talking about the love of freedom that beats in every human heart. Or he would have said that we are training the Iraqis so that we can hand over the endless job of insurgency-management to them. Both answers would have shown that we have no strategy to achieve victory and that this war is a fraud. All we are doing is staying in place, keeping total chaos from engulfing Iraq, and getting lots of American men killed and maimed in the process. But that is not war, and that is not victory.

National Health Service update. Protein. Equally poor care for all, as only government could provide.

Religion is thriving around the world. Atheists are puzzled. Dinesh D'Souza

Dirty old toad-suckin' dog. NPR. Shoot, I ain't sucked a toad since I was in collidge.

Government cheese  milk. Someone in govt made a good decision, but it looks bad. Milk sold to feed catfish.

From Anchoress, in a piece on the Michael Fox campaign advts:

The sufferings or privileges of a person’s past should have no bearing on whether or not you will deign to give them an ordinary measure of respect, and victimhood should never confer instant credibility (or unquestioning moral authority) on anyone, and I will not accept the empathetic and well-meaning gesture of my correspondant. I am still the exact same person I was last week, when he considered me more than worth a good tussle, and I will be damned if anyone is going to kid-glove and soft-focus me. Put up yer dukes, pally…you and me ain’t done fighting by a long shot, and don’t you dare freaking pity me and just roll over, or I’ll hammer you senseless.

How can you distinguish Christian love from pitiful submission and dhimmitude? From a piece at Dhimmi Watch:

The Protestant Lutheran Church in the German city of Hannover organized an exhibition to acquaint the Germans with Islam. The exhibition, entitled "The Faces of Islam," was the work of the female students of the Protestant Studies Institute in Aachen. On Palm Sunday in 2006, a Protestant church in Bochum, Germany celebrated Muhammad's birthday and invited the local Turkish community to attend the service. A Turkish music band played Sufi music during the service, in which Protestants and Muslims joined together in honor of Muhammad.

In the UK, church leaders wanted to invite the families of the London suicide bombers to a national memorial service in honor of the victims. Two senior Church of England bishops believed that extending the invitation to the bombers' families would acknowledge their own loss and send a powerful message of reconciliation to the Muslim community. Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, urged the nation to unite and turn would-be suicide bombers into friends by building "an inclusive circle of love."

In a similar vein, Fjordman warns against "naive compassion" in relation to Islam, in a piece titled Thou Shalt Hate Chrsitianity and Judaism. A quote:

The First Commandment of Multiculturalism is: Thou shalt hate Christianity and Judaism. Multiculturalists also hate nation states, and they even hate the Enlightenment, by insisting that non-Western cultures should be above scrutiny.

Re the BBC, from  a piece in View from the Right:

You’ve probably seen the news about the BBC admitting its left-wing bias. Unfortunately, to describe the BBC as biased is a huge understatement. The sheer cold malevolence toward Israel, toward America, toward traditional Britain, toward the West, toward God, toward existence itself that emanates from the BBC newsreaders and reporters is like nothing I’ve ever seen. It chills the soul. Soviet newscasters were mere grumpy apparatchniks by comparison.

Re Jihad, from a piece on Monday in Belmont Club:

Just a few hours ago, Sky News published an interview with a Taliban commander in Pakistan who stated his intention to attack Europe. Iraq is mentioned — of course — but not as the casus belli, simply as another theater in a larger campaign.

A Taliban commander has told Sky News that the militants are for the first time plotting to attack Westerners in Britain and the rest of Europe. ... Referring to Tony Blair and George Bush, Mullah Amin said: "It's acceptable to kill ordinary people in Europe because these are the people who have voted in the Government. "They came to our home and attacked our women and children. "The ordinary people of these countries are behind this - so we will not spare them. We will kill them and laugh over them like they are killing us and laughing at us." He said Taliban fighters were learning from the Iraq insurgency in their use of remote-controlled bombs, landmines and suicide bombers. He said: "They are our best tactic."

And the casus belli isn't about Afghanistan the nation-state at all either; nobody is fighting for the political independence of a country in the Western sense. It about the clash between the sacred space of Islam with the secular space of Europe. Two-tour Afghan veteran British Army Major Jamie Loden wrote a 25,000 word master's thesis on "The Need For An Ideological Response To Islamic Extremism", described in an interview in the Guardian.  Major Loden understood that there was a large element of infidel versus believer in the whole mix; that events in Helmand province and "Leicester and Bradford" were inextricably related.

He talked to me about the radical thinker Sayyid Qutb, about shariah law, about the difference between Shia and Sunni jurisprudence. Having addressed Islamic extremism through the library and through the bullet, he believes that US and British strategy is wrong from the foundations up. "You can improve homeland security from a purely physical point of view, you can increase security at airports, but that isn't exactly addressing the issue. Yes, it's making terrorist attacks harder to conduct... It's not addressing the rationale for it."

The west had to give more support and publicity to Muslims who were trying to reform Islam from within, he said. The implications of extremism spread way beyond the Middle East. He talked of the notion of "sacred space", the notion that land conquered by Muslims in God's name must remain Muslim and, if lost, recovered. "That means Spain, bits of France... all over the place." Loden said there was a more risky interpretation of the sacred space doctrine which said that land where Muslims had a political majority was actually Muslim land. "So when you have the debate in Leicester and Bradford about separate education, separate areas of the town, you know, communities being allowed to apply their own law - then you are in fact going down a fairly dangerous path."

and

It may have been the low cut dresses of American women that first planted the seed which was to grow into al-Qaeda's ideology but it was the blood shed by Marxist torturers that watered it. Qutb and later Osama bin Laden saw Marxism and secularism as agencies of the Devil; but to destroy them it was first necessary to destroy the world's system administrator: the USA. One of the real ironies of the War on Terror is that the most hated targets of al-Qaeda, the culturally liberal — the gays, feminists, entertainers, civil libertarians, artists and novelists — are its most vocal critics. It is only slowly dawning on al-Qaeda's pet hates that the Global Jihad is exactly about them and their whole belief system. Salman Rushdie knows it; Sayyid Qutb knew it. Some parts of Europe are beginning to know it; most will never admit it even to the second the blade is drawn across their throats. But the second greatest irony that the surviving non-Muslim believers in Europe — the Christians, Buddhists and Jews — have not only had to bear the intellectual brunt of defending liberalism up to now, but are now being asked to give up the public profession of their own faith in order to preserve it.

Going around. Mark Foley's plan for his future: To turn over a
new page.

The media's plan for the remainder of the election season, from ABC: Betsy. It isn't funny.

France's support of genocide in Rwanda. What a screwed-up country. RTLC.

Meanwhile, at home in France, the Intifada continues with 50,000 police (an army?) preparing for violence. More on these disgruntled "youth" at Gateway/ Updated events at No Pasaran.

Latest from Jib Jab: The Great Sketch Experiment.

Steyn sees western Europe wasting away. (h/t, Daily Pundit)

Hostility and paranoia in American Moslems. Moonbattery

Why Dems are dangerous with defence: IBD (h/t, Dinocrat)

Mitt Romney smacks down obnoxious, arrogant reporter. Good stuff. Sister T

Crime pays at the UN. Simon

Due to my work time schedule change, I will be posting at random times during the day for a while. Sorry, if you counted on my early AM posts.

Who needs government? The Czechs seem quite fine without one. Libertarians must love this story at TCS.

MSM uninterested in lefty vote fraud. Am. Thinker.

Caucasophobia - The Accepted Racism. Gates of Vienna

In my opinion, the Dem strategy is to distract from our booming economy, with anything they can think if: Michael Fox, Foley, Iraq - ANYTHING! It could work. Politpundit

Not nice. Even if you're very nice to Mr. Putin, he still insists on his interests. What a meanie. Am. Thinker. And what sort of idiot would expect otherwise?

Newsweek recants on the global cooling emergency. Remember? It was only a few years ago. The cause was air pollution.

The Krugman touch never fails. The Conspiracy to keep you poor and stupid

The appealing Mary Carey finds trivial cause to quit CA gubernatorial race. Why? Her Mom jumped off a building.

A blog we have somehow missed. NewsBusters.

And a new blog from Zimbabwe. h/t, norm

Re veils, at Mr. Free market. A quote:

When the true believers start rioting because someone has ‘dissed’ their increasingly absurd religion I just wonder what the police response will be? Will they stand idly by, “not wanting to inflame racial tensions further” or will they smash people’s skulls in as the thuggish Metropolitan Police did to old whitie when we went to Parliament Square to protest against the Hunting Bill?

The results of Australia's gun confiscation and oppressive gun laws: NOTHING... except people can no longer defend themselves.

Some truth about the stem-cell issue. Yes, of course it is being demagogued. What isn't? Here's the science. Shrinkwrapped

Hamilton College, post-Churchill, is seeking some sanity. Inside Higher Ed

Voter ID in Missouri. Quote from a piece in Opinion Journal:

People in the good state of Missouri need photo identification to cash a check, board a plane or apply for food stamps. But the state Supreme Court has ruled that a photo ID requirement to vote is too great a burden on the elderly and the poor. Go figure.

Moose are taking over Yankee-land. A conservation success, but a serious driving hazard. Hunting them is a bit like shooting a Holstein cow in a field. You make sure to kill them near a road: they are heavy.

Are you scared yet? Quoted via Junk Science:

Obligatory eye-roller: "Global warming and your health" - "Global warming could do more to hurt your health than simply threaten summertime heat stroke, says a public health physician. Although heat related illnesses and deaths will increase with the temperatures, climate change is expected to also attack human health with dirtier air and water, more flood-related accidents and injuries, threats to food supplies, hundreds of millions of environmental refugees, and stress on and possible collapse of many ecosystems that now purify our air and water." (Geological Society of America)

Why do champagne bubbles follow little chains of bubbles upwards, instead of randomly bubbling? That question has finally been answered,  just in time for holiday season. They follow little fibers of dirt and dust. Live Science. Yes, Veuve Clicquot is the official champagne of Maggie's Farm: time to stock up for Halloween.

Men imagine that women are flirting with them, when they aren't. Damn, no wonder I always screw it up. Villainous Company

Are we ready for a Mormon leader of the Senate? Of course. Why not? But did you know that Harry Reid is a Mormon?

Socially-responsible warfare? Only the Brits could come up with that notion. Jawa. I like the idea of recyclable, lead-free bullets.

Obedient German drivers: Blair

Religious bias in the law? Must Catholic organizations provide abortion services on their medical plans? NY Sun

Welfare reform hasn't preserved the family. That makes it a failure? LA Times. It got people to become independent and proud of themselves. That is success. No govt program will get people to marry.

Grammar back in educational fashion? Let's hope so. Althouse. Not that we write complete sentences here - we use telegram style.

The truth about activism, from a piece at Classical Values:

...I think it is so important for non-activists to understand that when they are dealing with activists, the apparent issue at hand is never the issue, but is only part of an agenda, and nearly always temporarily expendable. If you are willing to waste a huge amount of time going to the mat over one of these issues, thus forcing the activists to "lose," the issue will be set aside but another one will spring up in its place. Likewise, if you decide to let them have their way on a particular issue in the hope that they'll go away, rest assured that they will not. (Thus, the removal of Robert E. Lee's name from a particular street or building only clears the way for a new campaign to demand the removal of some other dead white slaveholder's name from something, and the process will continue ad infinitum, even after George Washington has long vanished from the dollar bill.)

More insanity from Britain: criminal charges for an error in voluntary recycling. Tangled Web. Good grief. This in a country where cops cannot chase a thief, because the thief might fall down and hurt himself, but dropping an envelope into the container of plastics - that's a Crime Against Humanity!

Doubling the width of the Panama Canal.  Publius

A Soros connection behind the Foley outing? Jawa

Riot Season in France to begin with a parade. Gateway

The terrorism-welfare connection, in Europe. Instapundit. Makes sense: if you have a job, you don't have time to burn cars.

Jeff's excellent temper tantrum: Yes, we know the feeling.

More bones found at ground zero. Bare Knuckle. Not to be insensitive, but you have to wonder - did Rove put them there?

Captain Ed on the Calame "apology" for publishing the NSA secrets:

Instead of acting as Chief Apologist, Calame should take his job a little more seriously in the future. The Times blew an important national-security program just to pump up its anti-Bush credentials, regardless of the fact that the program operated within the law and never abused the information it gathered. Calame dislikes the administration as much as the rest of the people at the New York Times, and in the guise of detached analysis endorsed the publication of a non-story in his zeal to undermine the White House using any means at their disposal. Everyone else knew that this story had no merit; it took the Times and its public editor four months to figure it out.

That should tell you everything you need to know about the New York Times.

 Michelle extracts these morals from that whole story:

Lesson No. 1: Never trust the Times' headlines.
Lesson No. 2: Never trust what's printed under the Times' headlines.
Lesson No. 3: Never trust what comes out of the mouths of the Times' editors and reporters.
Avoid the newspaper of wreckage, and help keep American safe.

Can facts have any impact on the tragedy of Chronic BDS? (Bush Derangement Syndrome). Doubtful. Willisms notes:

When the elections in November come and go, and Bush hasn't invoked martial law, suspended the Second Amendment, or had himself crowned king, what are the chances that Vidal and Lear, et al., will have their Emily Litella moment in public and admit they were less-than-correct? No one ever seems to call them on it - and when they do, the Vidals of the world have already lurched on to their next paranoid fixation or faux political outrage. They blog and they comment because this is a cry for help - they know deep inside that there is something wrong with their worldview, and this is why they will never take up arms to save the state from itself. There is still some small functioning part of their brain, that quietly tells them 'it is an odd fascism indeed that lets you blog, comment, own guns, assemble in peace and travel. Er, maybe it isn't fascism, after all?'

Que balas!  The campaign against Chavez.

Canadians try burning weed in Afghanistan. Soldiers feel effects. Sandmonkey

Re the BEEB, Sunday Mail quoted by Powerline:

It was the day that a host of BBC executives and star presenters admitted what critics have been telling them for years: the BBC is dominated by trendy, Left-leaning liberals who are biased against Christianity and in favour of multiculturalism.

A leaked account of an 'impartiality summit' called by BBC chairman Michael Grade, is certain to lead to a new row about the BBC and its reporting on key issues, especially concerning Muslims and the war on terror.

It reveals that executives would let the Bible be thrown into a dustbin on a TV comedy show, but not the Koran, and that they would broadcast an interview with Osama Bin Laden if given the opportunity. Further, it discloses that the BBC's 'diversity tsar', wants Muslim women newsreaders to be allowed to wear veils when on air.

At the secret meeting in London last month, which was hosted by veteran broadcaster Sue Lawley, BBC executives admitted the corporation is dominated by homosexuals and people from ethnic minorities, deliberately promotes multiculturalism, is anti-American, anti-countryside and more sensitive to the feelings of Muslims than Christians.

Scrap The Constitution! It makes it too hard to turn us into France. Am Spectator. Good grief. They never quit.

Cindy Sheehan paid by the Kerry campaign? Would not surprise me. Driscoll

Quote from David Brooks, via Althouse:

... Oakeshottian conservatism can never prevail in America because the United States was not founded on the basis of custom, but by the assertion of a universal truth — that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain rights. The United States is a creedal nation, and almost every significant movement in American history has been led by people calling upon us to live up to our creed. In many cases, the people making those calls were religious leaders. From Jonathan Edwards to the abolitionists to the civil rights leaders to the people fighting AIDS and genocide in Africa today, religiously motivated people have been active in public life. They have been, in their certainty and their willingness to apply divine truths, fundamentalists — if we want to use Sullivan’s categories. You take those people out of American politics and you don’t have a country left....

Conservatives need to relearn the lessons of Burke and Hayek — that the world is complex, and efforts to transform it will have unintended consequences, most of them bad. But if American conservatives give up their optimism and their universal creed, they will once again be a small sect at the fringes of political life.

This is indeed jaw-dropping. First paragraph of piece by Rick Moran:

Executive Producer David Doss reveals that CNN not only doesn’t care if their broadcasts give aid and comfort to the enemy in Iraq, but also that there is no difference between a US sniper and an enemy sniper.

I knew there was a reason I can't watch CNN: they just aren't my kind of people. Whole thing here.

If this is true, it should be big trouble. The Ted Kennedy/KGB story. Junkyard, via Ace. More at Driscoll. As Gateway puts it, "Please don't question their patriotism."  Yes, well, but this guy can get away with murder, can't he?

Gore Vidal joins the Moonbats. It does sound like satire, but the guy means it. Blue Crab. Projection is a terrible defence mechanism.

The annual flu shot hysteria. RTLC

I keep trying to get out, but they keep pulling me back in. Junior Gotti gets a pass, sort of. "He's a very nice boy."

Evil genius Karl Rove has been blamed for rising oil prices, falling oil prices, Katrina, 9-11, warm summers, the ozone hole, and for losing my socks in the dryer. Now he is blamed for the rising stock market. Rove must be God, disguised as a pudgy bald guy.

Autism gene identified. Finally. SDA

Young Republicans at Berkeley: Update at Volokh

Annie, Get your gun. We keep reading these sorts of stories. An un-armed, or pacifist person is called a "victim," in English. Listen: especially if you have kids: don't let a low-life scum take you away from them, because they need you.

On repealing the First Amendment. If the Left (with John McCain as a useful idiot ally) wants to undo the First, and many others wish to undo the Second, then why not all the rest of 'em? If political speech (advertising) costs money, then when you restrict money, you restrict speech. Simple. I even agree that George Soros is free to spend a billion dollars for Leftist, America-hating candidates if he wants to. It's supposed to be a free country, where you can debate one person's speech with more speech. Ten Napel on George Will.

Right Wing Howler  gets a bit non-PC with the Koran. Shame on you, Vilmar. That is insensitive. Did you find these sights in your neighborhood? Very bad manners. BAD DOG!

Boston Chicken: Deval avoids debate. New England Repub

From a piece by LaShawn:

If you have an SAT score of 1240 and a grade-point average of 3.2, your chances of being admitted to the University of Michigan undergraduate school are 9 out of 10.

If you’re black.

White or Asian? One in 10.

List of the earth's civil wars since 1940. A long list. Neo-neo

The NYT's remarkable Johnny Apple dies at 71. Obit here.

How do Dems define the Middle Class? Ankle-Biting

If this is hunting, I'm the King of Spain. Dust my Broom

Juan Williams attacked as "the black Ann Coulter." What? AlphaPatriot

It's James Baker time again! Baker plans the exits from Iraq. Reason

Martin Luther King Jr was a Republican. But you're not supposed to say that, are you? Lib Leanings

Foreigners who would like to see the Dems take over Congress: And Rightly So

From a piece by Friedman, via Best of the Web yesterday:

Although the Vietcong and Hanoi were badly mauled during Tet, they delivered, through the media, such a psychological blow to U.S. hopes of "winning" in Vietnam that Tet is widely credited with eroding support for President Johnson and driving him to withdraw as a candidate for re-election.

Tet, that is, was a military victory for the U.S. that turned into a propaganda victory for the communists because American journalists presented a false picture of what had happened.

Who is rich? And who is complaining? A quote from a piece Australia's Policy, by Wilkinson, entitled Against the Politics of Relative Standing (h/t, A&L Daily):

HL Mencken once quipped that, ‘a wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife’s sister’s husband.’ Writing last April on the definition of poverty in The New Yorker, journalist John Cassidy takes the logic of Mencken’s satire of low-grade ressentiment fully seriously and plumps for its liberal application to public policy. Cassidy argues that it is indeed a hardship to make less than your wife’s sister’s husband—or your co-worker, your next door neighbour, or anyone within the same national boundaries—and proposes that for the purposes of government ‘poverty’ be defined in terms of relative rather than absolute deprivation. In particular, he suggests that the poverty line be set at half the value of the median income. ‘If poverty is a relative phenomenon,’ Cassidy writes, ‘what needs monitoring is how poor families make out compared with everybody else, not their absolute living standards.’ [1]

While capitalism does in fact produce absolutely egalitarian results—enabling the poor to own high-quality mobile phones, microwaves, and cars functionally equivalent to those of the wealthy—it cannot, critics say, manufacture more and better ‘positional goods’, to use economist Fred Hirsch’s term, because, basically, it is impossible to fit more than ten percent in the top ten percent.[2] No matter how trusty, safe, comfortable, and efficient your new Hyundai Accent may be, the fact that is within the grasp of so many will keep it from signaling that you inhabit the commanding heights of society. And that’s what you really want, isn’t it? To be king of the mountain?

Read the whole interesting thing.

Image: Nude surfing season is coming, in Australia. We hope the Imams can get comfortable with this Aussie habit. Hey Imam - quit staring and take a cold shower.

The Who are going on tour, and bring forth first new record since 1982.

27 questions for Rupert Murdoch at Dem. Project

Looks like Minnesota will elect a Hamas supporter/sympathizer to Congress. Powerline. It's damn stupid, but it's a free country.

An evolution expert predicts an "upper class" and "lower class" of humans to diverge.

Liberals are open-minded and "tolerant," but if you disagree with them, you're an idiot. Dr. Helen looks at this familiar phenomenon.  (h/t, Blue Crab Blvd)

Good lawyers can always find an argument. Here's one: Too fat to die. AOL news. Hanging is needle-free, I believe.

How many people think that this is a real disease? Sounds like a crock to me. An infrared detoxifier? I sure hope tax dollars didn't buy that joke of a gizmo. NYT Science

Bill Clinton endorses torture "for specific purposes". Where's the outrage? Ace

My precious...Where can I get me one of these slick rings? Polipundit. American medicine needs to break its chains from the big pharmaceuticals and do good simple stuff like these people do, don't you think? We sure have a lot to learn from Asian medicine.

And, speaking of Asians, may I ask why Euro journalists always refer to Moslems as "Asians"? "Hundreds of Asian youth shouted chants to Allah while bombarding Parisian police with rocks." Just wondering, because they don't look like, or act like, regular Asians to me. Can't they call them Semites, or youths of Middle-Eastern origin, or Moslems, or something a bit more descriptively-accurate?

Atlas VLOGS our hero, Paul Belien.

The elections. Damn, do I miss Reagan. Rick Moran sees some signs of hope.

Another climate change heretic.  Tim Blair suggests warming him at the stake.

The Dem strategy: Ignore the economy. Nothing to talk about there. Driscoll. No, let's talk about important things like gays in congress. As Iowahawk has it, "It's the homos, stupid." Just don't think about the economy...and, by the way, it's terrible: Captain Ed

Remember Abdul Rahman?, asks Wizbang. Well, Jihad isn't done with him yet.

There is a simple moral to this sad story about limiting cod catches in the North Sea. Worstall

Wussy CT bans running up the score. How about banning running up the GPA, too? View from the Right

And speaking of GPAs:

(2006-10-18) — A new Brookings Institution study that shows an inverse relationship between math skills and student self-esteem is “just plain wrong,” according to an overnight poll of the nation’s largest teacher’s union.

The study found that Japanese and Korean students excel in math despite their lack of confidence in their own abilities, while American kids feel great about their abilities but have much lower skills according to tests.

Full story here, of course.

And lo and behold! More on GPAs. The "No child gets ahead" program. Classical Values

Is "first to market" a failing strategy? Business Pundit

We did not give Columbia Pres. Lee Bollinger credit for these words:

“This is not complicated,” Bollinger said in an October 6 statement, released two days after student protestors disrupted a talk by the founder of the Minuteman Project, Jim Gilchrist. “Students and faculty have rights to invite speakers to the campus. Others have rights to hear them. Those who wish to protest have rights to do so. No one, however, shall have the right or the power to use the cover of protest to silence speakers. This is a sacrosanct and inviolable principle.”

However, I have heard nothing about punishment yet. Update at Inside Higher Ed

Compare state taxes with revenue growth and employment growth. Willisms

There they go again. Moslems getting excited about condemning the new Apple building in NYC: Mudville

More on real estate in NYC: A very big deal. NYT

Wally can move big things easily, and could build Stonehenge with stones and sticks. A cool find at Never Yet Melted

Environmentalism as the new fascism: Tangled Web. One quote:

I am heartily sick of the evangelical Environmentals seeking to dictate to ME how I can live my life. Worse than that, it strikes me that the former socialists and communists out there are NOW hiding behind the comfort blanket of the Green Banner, using the environmentalist cause to control and limit our lives.

Why I want my kids to play with guns. Mr. Free market

Poor Ned: The Dems have abandoned him but he's now spent yet another 2 million of his own. Plenty more where that came from, but Ex-Donk is keeping count. Man is this guy rich (Ned, not Ex-Donk).

Hahaha. For you hunters: Season Shot. Kill 'em, and season 'em, at the same time. I'm about ready to go shoot that chicken in my freezer with that stuff. Can you throw a frozen chicken with a trap machine?

Justice Scalia explains the Bill of Rights to the ACLU. YouTube

Richard Landes and the the France2 trial in a superb piece by SISU. Read it, or you will be beheaded.

New smoking laws in Iran, here. How do you smoke through a burkha? (h/t, Normblog)

Callable bonds, for beginners: Clayton Cramer

Climate change on Mars blamed on Bush and Big Oil: MarsDaily

How do you tell a Sunni from a Shiite? Sounds like the first line of a joke. Real answer at Singleton

My dinner with Ken Mehlman. Fineman at MSNBC

Observation in a piece by Melanie Phillips:

(the) basic argument that unless we are nice to Muslims we will drive moderate individuals into the arms of extremists is badly flawed. The recent Pew survey showed that, of all the countries of Europe, the British were the nicest to their Muslim minority — and yet British Muslims hated their host country, the west and the Jews more than Muslims anywhere else. Moral: Islamic extremism is not reduced by the emollience of the host nation, and it may even be exacerbated by it. That is because it feeds not on strength, but on weakness: not on hostility, but on a collapse of cultural and religious nerve.

Image: Candidate for Wife of the Year. She's a workhorse.

300 million proud and happy Americans. Here are photos of some of us: Tim Blair

Frank Trainor wasn't too fond of Modern Times. Good comments. But is "Bob running away from himself"? Who is "himself," anyway? I do not know.

PJ O'Rourke (h/t, Dr. Sanity):

LIKE OTHER DEEP-THINKING people, I'm full of principled, idealistic, high-minded indignation at the GOP. What a stampede of sleaze. Jack Abramoff is the world's best lobbyist--for the Federal Penitentiary System. Bob Ney was deep in the ethical rough at St. Andrew's. Randy "Duke" Cunningham's favorite weap ons system turned out to be the political suicide bomb. Tom DeLay may or may not have broken campaign finance laws, but he did his best to look like he was breaking them. He might as well have tied quail feathers to the GOP majority in Congress and sent it hunting with Dick Cheney.

Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs. Splash! There goes Mark Foley! Now the news networks are broadcasting G.O.P.U. around the clock.

Actually, the Republicans should be grateful for their lying, thieving scum. It distracts the public from the things the Republicans have done that are honestly bad. Our postwar policy is creating Weimar Iraq. And when the Islamofascist Beer Hall Putsch comes there won't even be beer.

PJ should not be writing - he should be hunting grouse and woodcock in New Brunswick about now. Anyway, read the whole thing at the Weekly Standard.