In The Mail Today

Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future by Ben J. Wattenberg.

As Spock would say, and without a trace of irony, "Fascinating."

Swift Kick

The IRS may be an evil, malevolent force but it's strictly impersonal. They don't care whether you're up or down. When you're up they kick you in the nuts and when you're down they kick you in the teeth. It's all the same to them.

Last year I was up, and I earned about 30% more in income. The IRS wants 100% more in taxes. Which means that I basically worked October through December last year for 30¢ on the dollar. Man do my nuts hurt.

Rock Star

Professor Reynolds has some backstage snaps of Sarah Palin at the Tea Party Convention.

Those heels!

I'm sorry if I'm being disrespectful, but I was just a little bit reminded of this.

And for all the ladies of a certain age that think she's too pretty to be President: Nobody, not even Sarah Palin, gets to be 45 with a 17-year-old body.

The Real Story Behind the Numbers

John R. Lott, Jr. explains that 9.7% number.

There are two ways economists measure the number of jobs, the establishment survey that asks about 370,000 employers how many people they are employing and the household survey that asks about 110,000 people each month whether they are working....

The problem is that the two surveys have reached different estimates, with the household survey showing a significantly greater drop in the number of jobs than the establishment survey. And it turns out that there might be a simple reason for that....     ...the Bureau makes an assumption that the jobs created at new companies is about equal to the jobs lost at companies that go out of business.

Unfortunately, that assumption hasn't worked during the current recession. Firms have been going out of business and news ones haven't sprung up to take their place.

If my snippets are too brief, read the whole thing.

You Wise Guys Don't Know

This illustration is from The Bell Curve by Charles Murray, p. 46.

Study it for a moment. If, like me, you find that most of your friends, co-workers, and acquaintances have college degrees, then it is quite possible that you don't know anyone with an IQ much below 100.

Mayor Truax,

Would it be too much to ask you to place the question of whether we want light rail in Forest Grove on the November ballot? With all the problems it brings and with its exorbitant price tag, I think it should be the people of Forest Grove -- and not you alone -- to decide if we want this boondoggle.

Before you start spending our money -- and make no mistake, the money Obama is printing is still our money -- can you first fix all the broken sidewalks in the Old Town?

Don't you know or refuse to accept that light rail is the least efficient mode of transportation? The traffic congestion never improves because the rail doesn't go where people want to go. More importantly, this thing is just insanely expensive. You could build another TV highway, put several buses on it and still have some money left to fix the street in front of my house. There is a huge pothole that fills with water whenever it rains; I've been complaining about it for 10 years now but nobody cares. I guess the problem is too pedestrian for you.

If you want to erect another monument to government arrogance and your own vanity, here is an idea. Pave the rails over, paint some stripes and, look, there is a bike lane; you can even call it after yourself. How about Truaxway? You will solve two problems: you will take crazy cyclists off the TV Highway and forever bury the temptation for the ruling class to flush our money down the rail.

-- the Polish Immigrant

Winged words. I wish we had a hundred like him.

He Said It

Innominatus.

Jim Treacher... got Kerrigan'd be the Secret Service last night. They used to say "beware the black helicopters" but because of Barry's unholy deficits they can't afford them and are now using black SUVs. Keep your head on a swivel, people!

UPDATE: Now they're saying it wasn't Secret Service but rather State Department Security. Translation: Hillary going for a drug-induced joyride with her face out the window like a Labrador.

I don't LOL lightly, but I'm ROFL.

Obummer's Budget

Thanks to local blogger My Back Pages who found this at the Guardian. They, in turn, found all their numbers at the OMB.

You too can download all sorts of official budget numbers, including historical trends (my favorites), in convenient XLS spreadsheet format. Play with them, make your own graphs, look upon them, ye taxpayers, and despair!

Google: Assimilate or Die

Mountain View, CA:

Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index

Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to "organize the world's information," announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index.

"Our users want the world to be as simple, clean, and accessible as the Google home page itself," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at a press conference held in their corporate offices. "Soon, it will be."

OK, that's The Onion, but they have an uncanny way of predicting the future.

As of March 27, 2010, this blog — and thousands of others like it — will no longer be "Powered by Blogger." Google's cutting off the publishing function to any blog hosted on the user's own domain. "All your servers are belong to us" seems to be their new motto.

To hell with that.

Zeta Woof isn't going anywhere. I've written HTML by hand, and I've written code to write HTML. I'll cobble together the tools I need to publish this blog myself. I will never give in to the dork side of this farce.

"Don't be evil." Indeed.

Google is evil incarnate.

Ground Hog Day

I set the can of ground hog outside this morning and it cast no shadow at all. I believe that means an early spring.

Update: It's a new tradition. In the morning I'll divine the climate forecast with tinned meat products, and in the evening we'll celebrate with a ham loaf, baked by my lovely bride.