Bill Kristol has this gem at the end of a piece on Trent Lott and the spinelessness of his colleagues in refusing to publicly call for his ouster.

On Jan. 28, 1931, in the House of Commons, Winston Churchill expressed his disgust at Ramsey MacDonald's government:

"I remember, when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the program which I most desired to see was the one described as the 'Boneless Wonder.' My parents judged that the spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing to my youthful eye, and I have waited 50 years to see the Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench."

Be sure to read Lileks' new screed to get yourself in the mood for the Christmas season. He does a proper takedown of some Canadian, Christmas-hating idiots.

The result can be seen on a billboard looming over the Pat Bay Highway near Victoria, where commuters, rushing no doubt to buy gifts, are faced with this stark message: "Gluttony. Envy. Insincerity. Greed. Enjoy Your Christmas."

Pretension, Hatred, Conspictuous Arseholery, Snobfoolishness. Enjoy your life!

In truth, my Christmas will be nothing like the event the billboard pillories. Gluttony? We have a small turkey the size of a big dog's head, a cud of stuffing, a cup of gravy, a tin of peppermint chocolate. We live in an old house, you see; we don't have a vomitorium like most folks in the suburbs. I’m sure there are many who stuff their maws until their pants buttons pop off and ping against the walls like rivets on a sub that hits the ocean floor; I'm sure that all over this wretched land, gouty zeppelin-bellied men will stagger to their feet, raise a glass and shout ONE MORE WHALE LIVER SMOOTHIE FOR JESUS! I've never seen it happen, but I take the word of an insular, disapproving Canadian scold that it must happen, somewhere. Remember: the people who have no first-hand experience with the people they hate are always the keenest critics. (See also, Kulaks, Soviet Ukraine, disemboweling of)

Envy? Methinks thou doth project too much.

Insincerity? There might be a little of that, if I find myself at a Christmas party talking to some bitter, self-satisfied Christmas-hating jackass who doesn’t consider the season complete until he’s pissed in everyone’s wassail and told us we’re all greedy want-bots programmed to pour into malls and fill up our carts when we hear “Jingle Bells.” I might react with insincerity, nodding and smiling instead of grinding my heel hard on his forehead like I'd want to do. Greed? I don’t care if my wife gives me nothing more than a kiss and a refill. We want for nothing. Even on a day when we’re all sick, sniffing and hacking and puking and moaning, we’re still all doing it together, and that’s all we need. For gravy, there’s Jasperwood, and for biscuits, there’s Jasper. Who wants only a biscuit. And some gravy, dammit.

According to a recent survey, a majority of Germans say sex is more stressful than fun.

Some 51 percent of women and a full 58 percent of men said they felt more pressured than aroused during sex, citing a range of reasons: too little time, not enough conversation, an absence of affection or a lack of skill, the magazine Fit For Fun reported.

Make up your own comments.

US Intelligence sources say Iraq is preparing to destroy its own oil fields, food supplies and power plants and blame America for the devastation in the event of war. During a Pentagon briefing, officials told reports that Saddam intends to wreck his own infrastructure to create a humanitarian crisis to turn international opinion against the war. (Perhaps he hasn't noticed international opinion is already against the war).

The first efforts of the government to track your activities are here.

Researchers are working on a robot controlled by cultured rat neurons.

The device, which Potter calls a hybrot, is in essence a rat-controlled robot, and marks the first instance in which cultured neurons have been used to control a robotic mechanism. And while the hybrot’s movements may appear less than graceful, the knowledge gained could lead to computer chips modeled on biological systems—and perhaps even to computers that incorporate biological components. Such computers might one day learn, repair themselves, and perform certain tasks—such as dictation—at which binary-based systems are miserable. “I’m banking my whole career on the fact that there is a world of emergent properties in these neural networks that we don’t know anything about,” says Potter, who is a professor of biomedical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

If Christmas were a Jewish holiday. (via BlissfulKnowledge)

Obviously Nick Kristof and Sean Penn didn't talk to any of these people during their trips to Baghdad.

The Onion 'reports' that the Bill of Rights has been pared down to a manageable six.

WASHINGTON, DC—Flanked by key members of Congress and his administration, President Bush approved Monday a streamlined version of the Bill of Rights that pares its 10 original amendments down to a "tight, no-nonsense" six.

A Republican initiative that went unopposed by congressional Democrats, the revised Bill of Rights provides citizens with a "more manageable" set of privacy and due-process rights by eliminating four amendments and condensing and/or restructuring five others. The Second Amendment, which protects the right to keep and bear arms, was the only article left unchanged.

Calling the historic reduction "a victory for America," Bush promised that the new document would do away with "bureaucratic impediments to the flourishing of democracy at home and abroad."

A council of religious leaders from the Vatican, rabbis and various Protestant ministers will be working on cleaning up the ten commandments next.

I'm surprised the UN didn't have Ahenakew make the keynote address and the Durban conference on racism, he could've spoken right before Castro.

A respected Saskatchewan Indian leader said Friday Hitler did the right thing when he "fried" six million Jews during the Second World War.
...
"That's how Hitler came in. He was going to make damn sure that the Jews didn't take over Germany or Europe. That's why he fried six million of those guys, you know. Jews would have owned the goddamned world. And look what they're doing. They're killing people in Arab countries."

The 68-year-old Ahenakew made his remarks after giving a 45-minute, profanity-laced address to between 150 and 200 delegates attending an FSIN conference on a new Health Canada policy requiring Indians to sign a consent form before receiving certain health services.

During his wide-ranging speech, in which he complained about bigotry in Canadian society, accused the media of creating racial conflict and continually referred to non-Indian Canadians as "immigrants," Ahenakew said he lived in Germany during the late 1950s when he was with the Canadian army.
...
Approached afterwards to clarify his comments on Jews and the Second World War, Ahenakew said he agreed with his German friends. When asked how he could justify the Holocaust, Ahenakew said: "How do you get rid of a disease like that, that's going to take over, that's going to dominate?"

Ahenakew said when he served in Egypt in 1964. he saw Jews kill people. When asked for details, he said mines planted by the Israeli army killed civilians.

"All I know is what the Germans told me. Of course, I believe them. I saw the Jews kill people in Egypt when I was there. The Palestinians, Arabs. I saw them (Israel) f---ing dominate everything."

Antoine Clarke has an excellent lesson on income distributions and statistics. Now if we could only get some of the folks at the NYT to read it.

Let us imagine a country with nine inhabitants: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h and i. If a, b, and c have incomes of 100 per year, d has 90, e and f have 50, h has 30 and i has 20, then total income is 540, average income is 60 and the poverty line is 30 if calculated as 50 per cent of average, or 36 if calculated as 60 per cent of average.

The next year Bill Gates arrives with an income of 500. He employs h and i for an extra 20 per year (more than they were getting before). The result is: Bill Gates 460, a, b and c 100 each, d has 90, e and f have 50, h now also has 50 and i has 40. So everyone is out of the poverty level of the year before.

But this is where relativism kicks in: the new poverty line is 52 or 57.2 (depending on the 50 or 60 percent definition). So Bill Gates has not only 'failed' to lift h and i out of poverty by giving them jobs that paid better, he has impoverished e and f, who were previously not poor, even though neither e nor f has lost any income.
...
In the British case executing all elderly people aged over 60 who live alone on less than average household incomes would statistically eliminate poverty: either they would be dead, or more likely they would choose to live in groups of two or three and therefore rise towards average household income levels. Executing all students would also have a similar effect. Slaughtering everyone who lives alone would be a guaranteed success in a "War on Want".

This may appear insanely evil. Yet I have just described the policies of the Cambodian holocaust: Pol Pot really was 'tackling poverty'.

Brock Yates has a fine rant defending SUV's and calling for improved transportation infrastructure.

Thirty years of high-minded pontificating has produced little in the way of solutions, save for the truly idiotic and universally ignored 55 mph national speed limit and fuel-mileage CAFE standards that have had zero effect on reducing the nation's appetite for petroleum. The most futile efforts come from the elitists at the Times and other left-wing Chicken Littles in the form of demonizing Sport Utility Vehicles as the paradigm of American gluttony and Veblenesque conspicuous consumption. A new ad campaign will even suggest that driving an SUV offers tacit support to terrorists.
...
The movement of goods and services is the lifeblood of this mobile, versatile and highly creative economy. We cannot depend on the ever-increasing fleet of diesel-powered tractor trailers - which now number over 60 million - to haul intercity freight over crowded, crumbling interstates that in the last twenty years have seen traffic loads almost double (now involving 220 million motor vehicles) while road mileage has increased a paltry six percent. Add to that a weakened, smaller network of railroad freight capacity, suburban sprawl (motivated by high crime and other unpleasantries in our city centers), lousy rail and commuter bus systems and an airline industry that is, with a few exceptions like Jet Blue, on the rocks and we face disaster.

HappyFunPundit has some useful advice for Hollywood nitwits travelling to Iraq.

2. Likewise, ignore the baby food factories, the glorious arts and entertainment facilities, and the city's best eating establishment. If you want to be taken seriously, learn to at least recognize when someone is trying to blow sunshine up your ass. Potemkin villages have fooled nitwits like you for decades. By now, you should know better.

3. For God's sake ask some tough questions, will you? If you don't come home having made a few enemies, you weren't doing your job right. Instead of just complimenting them on the food and the sanitary conditions of the one room of the one hospital they allowed you to see, how about waving a few Amnesty International reports under their noses? Why not name some names? Ask what really happened to Saddam's architect. Get under their skin. If you expect them to slip up and tell you something important, you need to rattle them and knock them off script, much like you were in "I Am Sam".
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9. Make that Hollywood power work for you. If you really want to do some good, tell Saddam that if he doesn't come clean the U.S. government is going to jam his palace TV and replace all the shows with a very special Rosie O'Donnell network. All Rosie, all the time! No man can withstand that kind of threat.

Ben Stein offers some suggestions on how to ruin American competitiveness and innovation.

1) Allow schools to fall into useless decay. Do not teach civics or history except to describe America as a hopelessly fascistic, reactionary pit. Do not expect students to know the basics of mathematics, chemistry and physics.
...
3) Create a culture that blames the other guy for everything and discourages any form of individual self-restraint or self-control.
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10) Enact a tax system that encourages class antagonism and punishes saving, while rewarding indebtedness, frivolity and consumption. Tax the fruits of labor many times:

First tax it as income. Then tax it as real or personal property. Then tax it as capital gains. Then tax it again, at a staggeringly high level, at death.

There will be a lot of silly walking on the Cornell campus. John Cleese has accepted a position as visiting professor at Cornell.

Well this is an embarrassing correction:

An article on Nov. 10 about animal rights referred erroneously to an island in the Indian Ocean and to events there involving goats and endangered giant sea sparrows that could possibly lead to the killing of goats by environmental groups. Wrightson Island does not exist; both the island and the events are hypothetical figments from a book (also mentioned in the article), ''Beginning Again,'' by David Ehrenfeld. No giant sea sparrow is known to be endangered by the eating habits of goats.
(via BestOfTheWeb)

Both Max and I commented last week about the vicar who told a group of young children that Santa was dead. But Mark Steyn has the last (and best) words on the subject.

"You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen?" Mr Pinter asked rhetorically. "Forgotten. No longer referred to. Millions of dead reindeer slaughtered, their blood streaking the ice all around Santa's Workshop. Never mentioned. Millions of elves born without genitals. But you never hear about them.

"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer had a very shiny nose," he continued, "and, if you ever saw it, you would even say it glows. You know why that is? Depleted uranium. Oh, yes, don't worry, he can still guide your sleigh tonight. It's not hard to follow a reindeer whose rectum is leaking radioactive blood across the sky, is it?"

Nat Hentoff on the Total Information Awareness System and why it should be stopped before it starts.

Without any official public notice, and without any congressional hearings, the Bush administration—with an initial appropriation of $200 million—is constructing the Total Information Awareness System. It will extensively mine government and commercial data banks, enabling the FBI, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies to collect information that will allow the government—as noted on ABC-TV's November 14 Nightline—"to essentially reconstruct the movements of citizens." This will be done without warrants from courts, thereby making individual privacy as obsolete as the sauropods of the Mesozoic era. (Intelligence from and to foreign sources will also be involved.)

Our government's unblinking eyes will try to find suspicious patterns in your credit-card and bank data, medical records, the movies you click for on pay-per-view, passport applications, prescription purchases, e-mail messages, telephone calls, and anything you've done that winds up in court records, like divorces. Almost anything you do will leave a trace for these omnivorous computers, which will now contain records of your library book withdrawals, your loans and debts, and whatever you order by mail or on the Web.

As Georgetown University law professor Jonathan Turley pointed out in the November 17 Los Angeles Times: "For more than 200 years, our liberties have been protected primarily by practical barriers rather than constitutional barriers to government abuse. Because of the sheer size of the nation and its population, the government could not practically abuse a great number of citizens at any given time. In the last decade, however, these practical barriers have fallen to technology."

Joe Bob Brigg's gives a little history lesson on Iraq.

Fred has a good column on the quality of reporting at the major newspapers. (And it ain't pretty).

Satire becomes harder by the day because the real world is so absurd on it's own. Arafat is scolding Bin Laden for exploting the Palestinian cause for his own ends. Visions of pots and kettles calling each other names dance in my head.

Democrat/Republican Christmas Traditions

• Republicans say "Merry Christmas!" Democrats say "Happy Holidays!"
  
• Republicans help the poor during the holidays by sending $50 to the Salvation Army. Democrats help the poor by giving $50, one buck at a time, to panhandlers on the street.
  
• Democrats get back at the Republicans on their Christmas list by giving them fruitcakes. Republicans re-wrap them and send them to in-laws.
  
• Democrats let their kids open all the gifts on Christmas Eve. Republicans make their kids wait until Christmas morning.
  
• When toasting the holidays, Republicans ask for eggnog or mulled wine. Democrats ask for a "Bud."
  
• When not in stores, Republicans shop from a catalog. Democrats watch for "incredible TV offers" on late night television.
  
• Democrats do much of their shopping at Target and Wal-Mart. So do Republicans, but they don't admit it.
  
• Republican parents have no problem buying toy guns for their kids. Democrats refuse to do so. That is why their kids pretend to shoot each other with dolls.
  
• Republicans spends hundreds of dollars and hours of work decorating the yard with outdoor lights and Christmas displays. Democrats save their time and money, and drive around at night to look at other people's lights.
  
• Democrats' favorite Christmas movie is "Miracle on 34th Street." Republicans' favorite Christmas movie is "It's a Wonderful Life." Right-Wing Republicans' favorite Christmas movie is "Die Hard."
  
• Republicans always take the price tag off expensive gifts before wrapping. Democrats also remove price tags off pricey gifts ... and reposition them to make sure they are seen.
  
• Republicans wear wide red ties and green sports jackets during the festive season. Democrats do too, all year round.
  
• Most Republicans try, at least once, enclosing indulgent, wretchedly maudlin form letters about their families in their Christmas cards. Public ridicule from Democrats usually discourages them from doing it again.
  
• Democrats' favorite Christmas carol is "Deck the Halls." Young Democrats' favorite Christmas carol is "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer." Republicans'
  favorite Christmas carol is "White Christmas." Young Republicans' favorite Christmas carol is "White Christmas."
  
• Cheapskate Republicans buy an artificial Christmas tree. Tight-fisted Democrats buy a real tree, but they wait until the week before Christmas when the lots lower their prices.
  
• Democrat men like to watch football while the women fix holiday meals. On this, Republicans are in full agreement.
  
• Republicans see nothing wrong with letting their children play "Cowboys and Indians." Democrats don't either, as long as the Indians win.
  
• Republicans first began thinking like Republicans when they stopped believing in Santa Claus. Democrats became Democrats because they never stopped believing in Santa Claus.