Must read: P.J. O'Rourke speech from 1993

The Liberty Manifesto:

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

There are just two rules of governance in a free society: 

Mind your own business.  

Keep your hands to yourself.

Chicken

Chicken.

Thursday links

1955 article: Ancient War Machines, with schematics for models.

A 78-year-old woman famous for streaking on an airline information video has rescued a man who fell into a creek he was trying to urinate in.

A few million virtual monkeys are close to re-creating the complete works of Shakespeare.

Pakistani Truck Art.

The Origins of 7 Common Superstitions.

A Short History of the Income Tax

WSJ on the separation of the corporate and personal tax.

Troop demographics: Who fights for America?

Busting the myth about the "fact" that those who serve in the U.S. military typically have no other career options. "America's soldiers, they said, were poor and black".  

Indeed, the Heritage report showed that "low-income families are underrepresented in the military and high-income families are overrepresented. Individuals from the bottom household income quintile make up 20.0 percent of Americans who are age 18-24 years old but only 10.6 percent of the 2006 recruits and 10.7 percent of the 2007 recruits. Individuals in the top two quintiles make up 40.0 percent of the population, but 49.3 percent of the recruits in both years."

What about the charge that our Army is disproportionately black? This too is false, as is clear from data for fiscal 2010 available on the Army's website: Whereas blacks comprise 17% of Americans ages 18-39 with high school degrees, they represent only a slightly larger proportion of enlisted soldiers, at 21%.

Ford Pulls Anti-Bailout Ad After White House Complaints

Links and comments at Instapundit.

EPA: Regulations will require 230K new employees

at a cost of $21 billlion per year.  Not countin' the cost of the regs themselves, of course.

Paging Mark Steyn, and Spengler.

The world gets more crowded - with old people.
.
Foreign Policy: Until quite recently, such population growth always came primarily from increases in the numbers of young people. But in the future it will be the exact opposite.

God: Human Body Not Designed To Play Football

The Onion:  "O my children, I implore you, look deeply into your hearts, your minds, your extremely fragile and complicated knees—in fact every part of your glorious but mortal bodies—and ask yourselves if I really intended you to collide with one another as hard as you possibly can," God said.

Steyn: It’s the end of the world as we know it

You shouldn’t feel fine.