The dog that didn't bark

"The Hezbollah coup in Lebanon functioned as a test of what the US reaction would be, and unless something changes in the coming days, the answer is now obvious."

Superbowl stripper shortage

"...strip clubs surrounding Cowboys Stadium are looking for an additional 10,000 girls to entertain the overwhelming crowds expected during the Packers-Steelers matchup."

Why We Have Children

Timothy Dalrymple:

Lifelong singles can, of course, lead joyful and fulfilling lives and there are other ways in which they are shaped. In retrospect, however, my life prior to parenthood was like a symphony constrained to a single note. In the year that followed my daughter's birth, I felt—really felt—the whole spectrum of human emotions, the depth and richness of human experience. Through my daughter's eyes, I remembered wonder. Her laughter and unbridled joy reminded me why the world is good. She was a vessel of grace, a sacrament, and she returned me to life.

The Broken Economy

Dr. Zero: Throughout the long and stagnant years of his presidency, Barack Obama has never missed an opportunity to congratulate himself for doing a swell job of managing the economy.  He did it again during the State of the Union address, proudly boasting of having “broken the back of the recession.”  Meanwhile, the recession was dragging its hyper-alloy combat endoskeleton up behind him, its red camera eyes fixed with merciless intensity on the jobs it came to terminate, reaching for our throats with its bloodstained metal talons.

The Liquidating Hedge Fund That Blew Up The Gold Market

Comments and links at Zero Hedge.

Friday stuff

Get her something special for Valentines Day.  Here's another suggestion.

Lego art.

Life Without Left Turns.

Chopin's hallucinations caused by epilepsy.

Tequila Shots Are Done Differently In Sweden.

Debt plus Tetris equals Debtris, with animations for the U.S. and the U.K.

Alien Hand Syndrome - woman attacked by her own hand.

UFO kills off Brazilian fish.

Soldiers seize drug catapult on US/Mexico border.

A history of supercontinents on planet Earth.

I think gin and tonic prevents this: Malaria caught on camera breaking and entering cell.

Custom prosthetic legs.

Who knew?  For the last 8,000 years, the wine grape has had very little sex.

The year 2011, according to Thomas Edison in 1911.

Archaeologists claim to have discovered remains of winged humans.  Kind of related, What Paris Hilton would have looked like 2 million years ago.

Gallery of Ship Figureheads.

Wanted man performed plastic surgery on himself.

Breathable food.

NASA Marks 25th Anniversary of the Challenger Disaster

I remember my kids were in elementary school, watching the launch live when this happened.

The Great Misallocators: What Obama and General Electric have in common

WSJ.

Dennis Kucinich files lawsuit over olive pit

Presented without comment.

Lawmakers Seek to End Distracted Walking

I guess they're running out of things to regulate.

A State Insult with Chinese Characteristics, Unnoticed by Obama

I've been reading about this for the last few days, although there's been nothing in the MSM.

American.com: "Although Americans are often tone-deaf to cadences of symbolism in international relations, the Chinese are not. And for Chinese audiences, the symbolism of performing “My Motherland” to a host of uncomprehending barbarians in the White House itself hardly required explanation."

ObamaCare waivers jump from 222 to 729

At HotAir:

"This ever-expanding list of waivers is the direct result of ObamaCare raising the annual benefit caps on certain health plans. Obviously, a plan with higher annual limits is potentially more costly than one without them. The money to cover the difference in premiums has to come from somewhere. Without the waivers, it will come from the employer who are forced by law to upgrade to the more expensive plan. In other words, the 729 organizations who have received waivers are not seeking refuge from an unintended consequence, but from the costs associated with one of ObamaCare’s features. The real question is what these businesses will do once the waiver program comes to an end."

Climate change hero: Genghis Kahn

Mother Nature Network: "Over the course of the century and a half run of the Mongol Empire, about 22 percent of the world's total land area had been conquered and an estimated 40 million people were slaughtered by the horse-driven, bow-wielding hordes. Depopulation over such a large swathe of land meant that countless numbers of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests."

Not sure why they left out Stalin and Mao.

Tactical bacon

Tactical Bacon

Idaho, 6 Other States, to “Nullify” ObamaCare

At Hot Air.  Hard to believe this will work.

Breakthrough Laser Could Revolutionize Navy's Weaponry

Fox News: Scientists with the Navy's Office of Naval Research have demonstrated a prototype system capable of producing from thin air the electrons needed to generate ultrapowerful, "megawatt-class" laser beams for the agency's next-generation system. 

Why Everything Starts With Repeal

Krauthammer: Why Everything Starts With Repeal.

Friday stuff

LBJ Orders Some New Haggar Pants. (NSFW - language)

Clowns can boost IVF pregnancy rates, study says.

1950's cartoon- the car of tomorrow.

If Movie Characters Had The Internet, some films would have had no plot.

How birds (and bird-watchers) compute the behavior of a flock on the wing.

Norwegian Boy Fends Off Wolf Pack with Heavy Metal.

Scientists fight bugs with poo.

This has fascinated me since it happened: The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist.

Buffy turns 30 this week!

In Australia, Whole Parking Lot Swept Away by the Flood.

Thieves stole and snorted what they thought was cocaine. Turns out, the powder was actually the ashes of a woman's father and her two Great Danes.

Where's June Cleaver when you need her?  The DEA is seeking Ebonics experts.  Related: Experts Offer Rap Translations.

Chinese drivers can pay people to sit in a traffic jam for them.

A life-size Lego statue of Conan O'Brien.

German Police Pick up Drunken Owl.

Verizon Sues FCC over Net Neutrality

Politico: The company on Thursday filed an appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which has previously ruled that the FCC does not have the authority to adopt such sweeping regulations.

Steve Jobs taking medical leave

Maybe the iLiver is acting up.

HOWTO break Kindle book DRM

HOWTO break Kindle book DRM.

DVR alert - Onion Sportszone

Some funny shit - Tuesday nights at 10:30.

Here's the Who would you kill? segment from the last one.

The flip side of the 60's sexual revolution

Daily Mail:  "Most of us girls, at least those on the London rock scene as I was, didn’t have a clue as to what sex could be like when it was good. When we weren’t crying, we’d giggle, like the schoolgirls we were, about our exploits, without realising how damaging our sexual behaviour was both to our self-esteem and our souls."

Skynet getting closer to self-awareness

FoxNews: After four years of development, IBM on Thursday publicly unveiled a computing system that specializes in analyzing natural human language and answering complex questions. In other words, it’s really good at Jeopardy!.

Also at the Onion: Political Pundits Surprisingly Good At Getting Inside Mentally Unbalanced Shooter's Head

Heh.

NFL Season Seems To Be Building To Some Sort Of Climax

The Onion.

Study: Climate change contributed to fall of Roman empire

The Hill:

"Some House Democrats blamed their defeat in November’s mid-term elections partly on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's decision to force a vote on a climate change bill.

A new study suggests that climate change has claimed bigger political victims in the past. Much bigger."

Friday stuff

Beer Fridge Cannon Controlled by iPhone.

10 Unforgettable Stories History Forgot.

Why Can't We Walk Straight?

Scientists engineer flu-stopping superchicken.

Mosquitofish perform just as well as college students on a basic numbers test.

Man bites patrol car.  Sort of related: Fox shoots hunter.

Movie Title of the year (so far): "Codependent Lesbian Alien Seeks Same"

The Definitive Classification System for T-Shirts.

Gallery: Vintage New York City.

Paula Deen recipe of the week - read the reviews.

A history of blatant product placement in movies.

The evolution of Batmobiles from 1948 to 2010.

Drunk scientists pour wine on superconductors and make an incredible discovery.

Woman recreates 'Last Supper' with dryer lint.

A fat tummy shrivels your brain

Uh Oh.

Hostile Rhetoric, 2000 - 2010

"One would think that the incivility had started on January 20, 2009, and that political conversation of the previous eight years had been a modern-day Socratic dialogue. As Michelle Malkin demonstrates – in spades! — that is not exactly the case."

via Commentary.

D.C. Court Allows 2nd Amendment Challenges to Old Handgun Convictions

Volokh: "concludes that a defendant who pled guilty in 1996 to violating D.C. handgun ban can now have that plea set aside given D.C. v. Heller, assuming his conduct was indeed protected by the Second Amendment"

Know anyone who uses Similac?

48 pack of 2 oz bottles for $10 with free shipping.

Heh

“The problem with Internet quotations is that many are not genuine.”

~Abraham Lincoln

41% of all NYC pregnancies end in abortions

Comments and links at Hot Air.

Bringing the Bureaucrats to Heel

At American Spectator, a very good article on bureaucratic and regulatory overreach.

Thursday stuff

82-year-old nabs thieves.

Video: The one-man Village People.

Virginia DMV Revokes World's Greatest License Plate.

Time-lapse video of the Northern Lights.  Here's some Wikipedia information.

Unclear whether this falls into the "tax dollars at work" category: Scientists test enormous whoopee cushions. 

Huge Lego Europe relief map with monuments.

Romanian witches use spells to protest new taxes.

Karpen's Pile: A Battery That Has Been Producing Energy Continuously Since 1950.

$6,400 Kindle book, marked down from $8K.  Check the reviews.

What is the evolutionary purpose of tickling?

Ben Franklin’s 200+ Synonyms for “Drunk”

Gallery of ice sculptures from this year's Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival.  And here's a gallery of the Most Beautiful Jellyfish on Earth.  Also, Macro Photographs of Snowflakes.

Video: Chinese synchronized divers.

Girl gangs in London go back to the 18th century.

In Boston, the Charles river turns yellow.

Why Asparagus Makes Pee Smell.

Massive Inflation, Right under Our Noses

Kevin Williamson, at NRO: "The price of food and petroleum isn’t so much rising as the price of dollars, euros, yen, and renminbi is dropping."

Romanian witches use spells to protest new taxes.

Romanian witches use spells to protest new taxes.

Labor's Coming Class War: Public vs. Private Unions

At WSJ:

"These days the two types of worker inhabit two very different worlds. In the private sector, union workers increasingly pay for more of their own health care, and they have defined contribution pension plans such as 401(k)s. In this they have something fundamental in common even with the fat cats on Wall Street: Both need their companies to succeed. 

By contrast, government unions use their political clout to elect those who set their pay: the politicians. In exchange, these unions are rewarded with contracts whose pension and health-care provisions now threaten many municipalities and states with bankruptcy. In response to the crisis, government unions demand more and higher taxes. Which of course makes people who have money less inclined to look to those states to make the investments that create jobs for, say, iron workers, electricians and construction workers. 

Some of these folks are beginning to notice."

Interesting that they don't mention non-union workers - the vast majority of us.

American Decline: This time it's for real.

At Foreign Policy:  "In the end, of course, the Soviet and Japanese threats to American supremacy proved chimerical. So Americans can be forgiven if they greet talk of a new challenge from China as just another case of the boy who cried wolf. But a frequently overlooked fact about that fable is that the boy was eventually proved right. The wolf did arrive -- and China is the wolf."