NURSE BLOOMBERG HAS HIS PRIORITIES: As Crime Skyrockets in NYC, Bloomberg Focuses on Gun Control … in Virginia.

WE SHALL FIGHT THEM IN THE HILLS: In 1940 Churchill built a top secret army: a British resistance movement primed for a Nazi occupation. History tells us it was never needed – but a new movie imagines a very different scenario.

Harry Turtledove, call your office!

UPDATE: Andrew Morriss emails:

Check out When WIlliam Came by Saki – a great pre-WW1 story of German occupation of Britain.

Story summarized here.

Interesting.

ED MORRISSEY: Hennepin County makes the right choice in Good Samaritan shooting.

Give some credit to Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman, even if the outcome of the Evanovich case was nothing more than common sense. Darren Evanovich and his sister participated in an armed robbery outside of a grocery store in Minneapolis last week, which they concluded by pistol-whipping the middle-aged woman they robbed. A Good Samaritan chased after Evanovich, but Evanovich pulled the gun when he turned the corner. Unfortunately for Evanovich, the Good Samaritan had a carry permit and a handgun of his own — which he drew and fired after Evanovich drew first. Evanovich died almost immediately, and the question became whether the police and/or the DA would charge him with homicide.

Not only did Freeman decline to press charges, he commended the Good Samaritan for responding to “his fellow citizen in need.”

Somewhere, Joel Rosenberg is smiling.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON the politics of indulgences:

In a nutshell, our American elites, even if well-meaning with real concern for the less fortunate, have adopted the medieval practice of compartmentalization. Loud demonstrations of general progressive piety exempt one from consistency. Our medieval ancestors could practice usury if they helped repair a collapsed nave or joined a Crusade, as traditional Christianity tried to deal with an imperfect world of important Christians who did not wish to live by their doctrine.

Read the whole thing.

ANOTHER SETBACK FOR CAPE WIND:

The Cape Wind experience also shows that it does not take much to gum up the regulatory gears for new projects of this sort. Opposition to Cape Wind has been driven by a few dozen families willing to invest their time and money to influence the regulatory process — and it’s worked. It does not matter whether a proposed project is popular with local residents, as a relatively small group of naysayers can exploit existing regulatory requirements to slow things down in the hope of eventually killing the project altogether. If other offshore wind projects are to succeed where Cape Wind has (thus far) failed, they will must prepare for similar opposition, and encourage regulatory reforms that will streamline wind project development and approval.

Perhaps people on the right should start trying harder to take advantage of statutes that allow people to gum up the works. If nothing else, the use of such techniques to advance rightish causes will cause the press to suddenly take a more critical look at the underlying laws . . . .

UPDATE: From the comments: “I think there is a legal Laffer curve, and we are choking on so much law we are now past the inflection point.” Thanks to reader Fred Siesel for pointing this one out.

CAYMAN UPDATE: U.S.S. Kittiwake, before and after Hurricane Rina. As one of my Cayman dive buddies notes on Facebook, “She moved! Holy cow! AND she went seaward!!! that wasn’t even a real storm!” More tie-down chains with deeper anchor posts would seem to be indicated for the future. Here’s my pre-hurricane Kittiwake dive video.

BLIZZARD COVERAGE FROM DaTechGuy, who somehow still has power.

MY PIECE IN TODAY’S NEW YORK POST: Government inflated the college loan bubble, but Obama isn’t fixing it.

OBAMA AND THE LOBBYISTS: Examiner first on story, NYT second, WaPo whiffs. “The bottom line on the Obama lobbyist-connected fundraising: the Washington Examiner got the story first, the New York Times got the story soon after and the Washington Post missed it altogether. Not good for a newspaper that has prided itself over the years, and for good reason, on its political reporting.”

The WaPo doesn’t seem overly interested in being first with bad news about Obama.

THE HIGH-STAKES MATH BEHIND the West’s greatest river.

The Columbia is a river of colossal proportions: it’s the most voluminous in the West, draining an area the size of Texas and each year passing 60 cubic miles of water to the Pacific Ocean. The 14 structures that harness it are equally formidable: a dam is likely to be the largest manmade object, the most exuberant feat of engineering that you’ll ever see, and the Columbia’s are among the world’s biggest. But as large as the dams are, their margins are minuscule and operating them takes unerring foresight and subtle management: let too much water fill reservoirs and a rainstorm might flood Portland; keep the reservoirs too empty and you’ll parch farmers. Send too much water over a dam’s spillway and you’ll suffocate fish with dissolved gases; send too much through its turbines and you’ll overload the electrical grid.

The difficulties are not widely appreciated.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: It’s not the rich who are destroying middle America, it’s the upper-middle-class.

Related: Stuck At the Bottom: Culture And The American Dream.

UPDATE: Maybe it’s more a New Class problem. Here’s something I wrote a while back:

Rand Simberg blames BBC snobbery on upper-middle-class sensibilities, and I think he’s almost right. It’s really a case of New Class sensibilities.

I can’t help but notice that anti-Americanism, and the various manifestations of what some have called Transnational Progressivism, are most common among people who, well, have state-supported managerial or intellectual jobs, the people who made up what Milovan Djilas and others called the “New Class” of bureaucrats and managers in the old Communist world. Not surprisingly, the New Class was deeply concerned with matters of status and position, and deeply opposed to things that might have led to competition on merit. There’s nothing new about such a view, which predated communism: As David Levy and Sandra Peart note, it’s an attitude that even in the nineteenth century was characteristic of anti-capitalists and anti-semites – and, nowadays, there’s a lot of overlap between anti-capitalists, anti-semites, and anti-Americans.

A common thread among anti-semitism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Americanism is the fear of being outdone by people willing to work harder. It’s not surprising that such a fear exists among a disproportionate number of those who take state-supported jobs. It’s thus not surprising, then, that New Class sensibilities are so often anti-American and anti-capitalist, and increasingly (or perhaps I should say, once again) anti-Semitic, too. The New Class, in this regard, as in many others, is like the old haut-bourgeoisie.

The New Class is characterized as much by self-importance as by higher income, and is far more eager to keep the proles in their place than, say, Applebaum’s small-town dentist. It’s thus not surprising that as its influence has grown, economic opportunity has increasingly been closed down by government barriers.

MORE: Further thoughts from Ross Douthat:

The public-sector workplace has become a kind of artificial Eden, whose fortunate inhabitants enjoy solid pay and 1950s-style job security and retirement benefits, all of it paid for by their less-fortunate private-sector peers. Some on the left have convinced themselves that this “success” can lay the foundation for a broader middle-class revival. But if a bloated public sector were the blueprint for a thriving middle-class society, then the whole world would be beating a path to Greece’s door.

Our entitlement system, meanwhile, is designed to redistribute wealth. But this redistribution doesn’t go from the idle rich to the working poor; it goes from young to old, working-age savings to retiree consumption, middle-class parents to empty-nest seniors. . . . Then there’s the public education system, theoretically the nation’s most important socioeconomic equalizer. Yet even though government spending on K-to-12 education has more than doubled since the 1970s, test scores have flatlined and the United States has fallen behind its developed-world rivals. Meanwhile, federal spending on higher education has been undercut by steadily inflating tuitions, in what increasingly looks like an academic answer to the housing bubble. (If the Occupy Wall Street dream of student loan forgiveness were fulfilled, this cycle would probably just continue.)

The story of the last three decades, in other words, is not the story of a benevolent government starved of funds by selfish rich people and fanatical Republicans. It’s a story of a public sector that has consistently done less with more, and a liberalism that has often defended the interests of narrow constituencies — public-employee unions, affluent seniors, the education bureaucracy — rather than the broader middle class.

Do tell.

PYTHON FOUND WITH INTACT ADULT DEER IN STOMACH: “This is clearly an extreme event,” he told the Sun-Sentinel. “It shows you they can eat huge things.”

ER, PURE DELICIOUSNESS? What’s the McRib Made of, Anyway?

UPDATE: Clarice Feldman writes: “Meat protein glue is used in top restaurants now.” More here.

MISSISSIPPI JUVENILE COURT SCANDAL? Parents of jailed Mississippi teens say they may sue. “The parents of three 15-year-olds who were strip-searched and jailed for three days after a trespassing charge expressed outrage Thursday during a press conference and called for the removal of Tate County Youth Court referee Leigh Ann Darby. . . . During an Oct. 20 proceeding with Darby recused, the youths were found not guilty of trespassing.”

CELEBRATE DIVERSITY!

Lars Vilks takes all this in good humor. Nevertheless, it is still faintly stunning to me that you can find within a population the size of Waterford and Cork seven Muslims willing to participate in a plot to kill a Swedish artist. Even at the height of the Irish “Troubles”, you’d have been hard put to find seven residents of Waterford willing to participate in a plot to kill, say, a British cabinet minister.

But things are different now.

I predict that this will end badly. Like other poorly-thought-out experiments of Europe’s elites.

IS APPLE’S SIRI a Google killer?

MARK STEYN: Adult Babies: There’s Almost Nothing You Can’t Get Government To Pay For. Well, actually the likelihood of government subsidy increases as the likelihood of promoting social dysfunction goes up. Or at least, that’s how it seems.

HOW TO GET FIRED.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Michelle Obama and ‘the Few at the Top.’ “When Ms. Obama charges, ‘Will we be a country where opportunity is limited to just the few at the top? Who are we?’ one wonders, why, then, in the past three years of hard times, did she insist on vacationing, in iconic fashion, at Vail, Martha’s Vineyard, and Costa del Sol, the tony haunts of ‘the few at the top’? In these rough times, surely a smaller staff, less travel, and budgetary economies would have enhanced her populist message of some at the top enjoying perks at the expense of others.”

TELEGRAPH: Why the latest eurozone bail-out is destined to fail within weeks.

IN CALIFORNIA, A RURAL REBELLION IS BREWING. “These used to be wealthy resource-based economies, but now many of the towns are drying up, with revenue to local governments evaporating. Unemployment rates are in the 20-percent-and-higher range. Nearly 79 percent of the county’s voters in a recent advisory initiative opposed the dam removal, but that isn’t stopping the authorities from blasting the dams anyway. These rural folks, living in the shadow of the majestic Mount Shasta, believe that they are being driven away so that their communities can essentially go back to the wild, to conform to a modern environmentalist ethos that puts wildlands above humanity.”

Just “occupy” the water pipelines to the cities and you’ll get noticed. But expect less favorable press treatment than the OWS folks got.

OCCUPY DENVER turns violent. This seems to be happening a lot. Again, the contrast with the Tea Party rallies is instructive.

AT AMAZON, markdowns on Toys & Games.

GOT TO GET JEW INTO MY LIFE: Paul McCartney converting to Judaism?