ninme

Cool!

Telegraph - Brian May studies the stars for PhD

Brian May, the lead guitarist from the rock group Queen, has swapped learning riffs for studying the stars in order to complete a PhD. The 60-year-old rock star, who has recently published a book on astronomy with Sir Patrick Moore, is going [...]

Categories: Science and Nature

pays your property taxes?

I love home ownership. You grow up with your parents telling you it’s none of your business and when it is your business you’re too old for anyone to think you need to be told anymore.

Categories: Business & Media

Can’t wait till Washington (state) notices this!

Opinion Journal - Cheese Headcases Wisconsin reveals the cost of “universal” health care.

This exercise is especially instructive, because it reveals where the “single-payer,” universal coverage folks end up. Democrats who run the Wisconsin Senate have dropped the Washington pretense of incremental health-care reform and moved directly to passing [...]

Categories: Politics

BBC - Taleban commander ‘kills himself’

An Islamic militant leader, wanted for kidnapping two Chinese engineers in Pakistan in 2004, has blown himself up to avoid arrest, Pakistani police say. Abdullah Mehsud, who spent 25 months in custody at the US base in Guantanamo Bay, died in south-western Balochistan province, a [...]

Categories: War and Peace

The Times - A very Turkish coup? It may already be under way, by Amir Taheri

Mr Erdogan himself is an enigma. He gives the impression of a genuine democrat who believes that religion is a private matter. And yet he sent his daughters to university abroad because they were not allowed to wear [...]

Categories: Politics

I was going to make this the funniest item of the day (there’s a great punch line at the end) but I just couldn’t. Scruples. Taste. Conscience.

Opinion Journal - Best of the Web Today, by James Taranto

‘It Didn’t Happen’ We suppose it was inevitable: Four and a [...]

Categories: War and Peace

City-Journal - In the Heart of Freedom, in Chains, by Myron Magnet Elite hypocrisy, gangsta culture, and failure in black America

It’s a long (looong) essay (but a quick read), but of all of it this part stood out, because it’s something I was pondering on the other day (forget why):

A vicious circle now operates [...]

Categories: People and Current Events

Now (assuming this guy is right) we’re all screwed.

Times Online - Last king of Afghanistan dies, aged 92

Mohammed Zahir Shah, who as the last king of Afghanistan led his country through 40 years of stability before watching it unravel from exile, has died at the age of 92. Zahir Shah [...]

Categories: Politics

Saturday came and went and no one got bombed. Damnit Cheney! What a missed opportunity.

Categories: War and Peace

The Telegraph - Treatment isn’t working

There is a consensus that the state should pay to treat people when they are ill or injured. It doesn’t follow, however, that the state needs to own hospitals, run clinics or hire doctors. There are plenty of ways, within a publicly funded system, to [...]

Categories: People and Current Events

The Telegraph - Nobody is to blame for this Biblical weather

The wartime generation grasped more readily than we do that terrible things sometimes just happen: that they are no one’s fault, that no one could have stopped them and that there is no one to sue.

Is that so?

Categories: Science and Nature

He’s cheering me up.

The Sunday Times - Does Britain really want to be Belgium? Sarah Baxter Interview

And true to his warlike leanings, Bolton has some weapons stashed in his locker for Gordon Brown. “If Gordon Brown knew what he was doing when he appointed Mark Malloch Brown, it was a major [...]

Categories: Geography and Foreign Affairs

Steyn Online - LIGHT MY FIRE Song of the Week #64 by Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek, Jim Morrison and John Densmore

It was 40 years ago today-ish that Sgt Pepper was going on about how it was 20 years ago today. That’s to say, the “Summer of Love” is 40 years old: It’s as long ago [...]

Categories: Entertainment

Sure their people are starving (more aid, please!), but apparently they have the money to buy Katyushas and RPGs and models of Katyushas and RPGs!

I spent a fair amount of time in model shops in my youth and man, models that good must cost something.

Categories: War and Peace

Even I think this is a bad idea:

The Sunday Times - Atticus Cardinal takes on bastion of job discrimination - the monarchy

Refuse to give a job to a Roman Catholic and you’d soon find yourself facing a claim for religious discrimination. Unless, of course, you’re trying to fill a vacancy on the British throne. [...]

Categories: People and Current Events