My colleague Alex Nowrasteh and I recently wrote a column for The Daily Caller favoring letting more high-skilled immigrants become U.S. citizens. Here is a persuasive and well-reasoned excerpt from commenter jobs4us, who disagrees:
Don’t buy into this baseless propaganda – it is straight from Adolf Hilter’s playbook
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Posted in General Foolishness, Immigration
Tagged godwin's law, hitler, Immigration
This is quite possibly the least subtle chart I have ever seen. See the original here. Expect OSHA and HHS to issue new regulations in 3… 2…
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Posted in General Foolishness, Mankind's Doom
A new bill in the Wisconsin legislature would make the cream puff the state’s official dessert. An influential lobbying group consisting of fourth-graders from Mukwonago used Facebook and other media to pressure Sen. Mary Lazich into introducing the bill.
Despite support from the powerful Wisconsin Bakers Association, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel points that the cream puff bill’s success is not guaranteed. Previous attempts “to make Harley-Davidson the official state motorcycle and to recognize the microbe that turns milk into cheese failed to pass.”
This blog will be paying very close attention to the heated legislative battle in Madison to give the delicious cream puff its due. After all, the time that legislators spend on this is time they aren’t spending passing more harmful legislation.
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Posted in General Foolishness, Political Animals, Regulation of the Day
Tagged cream puffs, harley-davidson, official state dessert, wisconsin, wisconsin bakers association
In journalism lingo, the lede (pronounced “leed”) is your lead sentence or paragraph. It’s spelled funny to avoid confusion with the word “lead.” A good lede grabs the reader’s attention and makes him want to keep reading.
Today, for example, I came across an article that contains what may well be the most effective lede of all time:
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A West Virginia man found wearing women’s underwear and standing over a goat’s carcass told police he was high on bath salts.
Posted in General Foolishness
It’s funny because it’s true. Click on the picture to enlarge.
The Wall Street Journal‘s James Taranto links to my article “Are Text Messages an Antitrust Issue?” in his Best of the Web Today column.
It’s in the Questions Nobody Is Asking section.
He has a point!
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Posted in General Foolishness, Media Appearances
Of course, Wisconsinites have trouble with some of them, too.
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Posted in General Foolishness, Sports
Up or down? The debate is as old as the toilet itself. An enterprising young economist named Jay Pil Choi wrote a working paper titled “Up or Down? A Male Economist’s Manifesto on the Toilet Seat Etiquette,” and it turns out the correct answer is neither.
If the seat is always left down, men incur an inconvenience cost of 2: 1 to lift the seat, and 1 to lower it. Women incur a cost of 0. This is hardly fair.
Leaving the seat up is no better. The costs are the same. They just switch gender. This isn’t fair for women, who must lower the seat and raise it every time they use the loo.
Choi’s paper suggests a third way: leave the seat as you left it. As he explains:
With either up or down rule, each member of one gender group has to incur the inconvenience costs two times with each usage… This inefficiency can be avoided by using the selfish rule since the inconvenience costs are incurred only when the consecutive users are from different genders.
Quite clever. The highest possible inconvenience cost is 1. And if consecutive users are of the same gender, inconvenience costs are 0.
Unfortunately, this blogger must continue to follow the down rule because his cats are too thirsty for their own good.
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Posted in Economics, General Foolishness
Tagged jay pil choi, toilet etiquette, toilet seat etiquette
Saudi Arabian police arrested a vulture that they believed to be a Mossad spy. Scientists at Tel Aviv University tagged the bird so they could study its migration patterns, which apparently include rural Saudi Arabia. Haaretz reports:
[R]esidents and local reporters told Saudi Arabia’s Al-Weeam newspaper that the matter seemed to be a “Zionist plot.”
The accusations went viral, with hundreds of posts on Arabic-language websites and forums claiming that the “Zionists” had trained these birds for espionage.
It is not clear if the bird’s guilt has been determined by Saudi authorities, or what its sentence will be.
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Posted in General Foolishness, The Old Religion
Inertia Wins! 