Read it.

And laugh.

Read it.

Using a CMOS sensor to take almost instant readings, the vein scanner is deadly accurate — the chances of it authorizing the wrong person are a million to one.

Read it.

DirectBuy sucks. It sucks hard. It sucks because they hardsell you into buying a membership (you get one chance to join) and don’t give you a chance to compare prices before joining. It sucks because (according to many testimonials) they often don’t deliver the savings advertised. And most of all, it sucks because once you’ve joined you’re in a 10-year contract and they’ll turn you over to a collections agency if you don’t continue to pay them–damaging your credit and subjecting you to harassment.

We passed on a opportunity to join one of these operations and have never regretted it.

Read it.

Your life under Islam. Don’t say that you weren’t warned.

Read it.

A modified virus makes cancer cells fluoresce to better identify tumors.

Read it.

Electrons in a conductor seem to behave differently under gravitational and inertial accelerations, threatening to tear down one of the cornerstones of modern physics.

Read it.

Read it.

About 85 percent of the approximately 75,000 police cars sold in the United States each year are Crown Vics.

That is not a huge number of vehicles, and margins on sales to public agencies are notoriously slim, but analysts say it is still a profitable business for Ford.

“The majority of the investment in the Crown Vic was paid off so long ago that they’re basically a license to print money,” said auto analyst Jim Hall of 2953 Analytics LLP in Birmingham. “They also have zero marketing cost.”

But Ford Americas President Mark Fields said the police business provides other benefits to Ford that go beyond the bottom line.

“Every municipality has police, so you have Ford product everywhere across the country,” Fields said. “It reinforces that Ford is part of the community.”

Ford stopped selling Crown Vics to consumers in 2007, but many police officers say they would prefer to keep the outdated sedan. Though long past its prime and easily outrun by vehicles as mundane as the Honda Accord, it nonetheless offers cops some features they can find in few other vehicles — most of which are considered liabilities, not assets, by civilian motorists.

Moreover, most of the aftermarket equipment produced for police vehicles — everything from computers to light bars — is designed to fit the Crown Vic. When some departments tried to make the switch to Chevrolet Impalas, they found that their communications equipment and computers did not fit in the narrower vehicle.

For cash-strapped agencies like the LAPD, abandoning the Crown Vic would also pose a serious fiscal challenge. It has millions of dollars invested in not only the cars, but also in parts, equipment and training.

So: it’s a profitable line of business for Ford, both financially and in terms of pubic relations; cops like the car and have built their operations around it, and having to change would cause already-financially-strapped units of government hardship.

Well, then, the only thing to do is quit producing them.

There, in a nutshell, is the American auto industry, and why it’s in trouble.

Read it.

How do he and Melinda, 45, raise kids amid such wealth?

“It’s everything from going around the dinner table saying what we’re thankful for to going downtown and serving meals together” at a soup kitchen, he says. There are also occasional trips overseas, most recently to impoverished African towns.

Yeah, I can see that — if I were the richest guy in the world, one of my top priorities would be exposing my children to Third World diseases.

Read it.

Released Thursday, the study does not try to prove that speculators caused the price spike, as many politicians and consumer advocates believe.

But the authors note that prices rose steadily along with the number of speculative investors, and fell with them as well. Seven years ago, speculators accounted for 20 percent of oil traders on the New York Mercantile Exchange. That number jumped to 55 percent by the time oil prices reached their all-time peak above $145 per barrel last summer. Now oil costs $72, and speculative investors account for half the traders.

Read it.

Google has anointed an “approved list” of writers it thinks you should read. But not only is Google’s choice far from “Neutral” – there’s no libertarians, merely one (shrieky and not very representative) conservative, and a preponderance of Greens – there isn’t a Google critic amongst them. Well, there goes “neutrality”.

The tech pundits Google chooses are safe, flavourless, humourless, and uniformly Google-friendly – it’s a list of Google’s trusted pals, really. If you locked them in a room with some drugs, by the end of the evening you’d have heard no new original insight or wit – and the drugs would be untouched. For example, Chris “Long Tail” Anderson tops the list. Do you need to know more?

Jerry Pournelle runs what may be the original blog and always has interesting things to say.

On education, the usual critique of charter schools is that they are guilty of “cherry picking” which is to say, they accept only students who want to learn something and are willing to be disciplined. Thus an academically accomplished charter school in DC was not allowed. Cherry picking is supposed to be a bad thing? As opposed to the current practice of making those who would like to learn in DC go to a school that accepts those who do not want to learn and refuse to be disciplined? And this from people who are supposed to be liberal? It seems to me a very good way to keep the blacks in their place. Make them go to lousy schools filled with disorder while you send yours to schools that have discipline, and then on to Harvard. Is that the goal of liberalism? To keep the blacks down? Because I think of no better way to accomplish that goal than what is happening in DC. Tons of money spent on truly horrible schools that no one who could possibly escape them would go to? Would anyone who had in mind the good of black children in DC permit the current school system there to exist for ten minutes more?

The money is spent, and the results are known, and nothing is to be done. Yet under the Constitution the Congress is responsible. One presumes that both parties intend the results obtained since neither party makes any attempt to do anything about it.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

What does that say about tadpoles and frogs?

Megan McArdle is always worth reading.

First of all, as it shows in the articles I linked earlier, something like 90% of homicides are committed by people with criminal records, i.e. people who probably cannot legally own a gun. A lot of the rest are committed by juveniles, or mentally unstable people, who also cannot legally own a gun.

It is perfectly true that adding a gun to a dispute involving violent criminals increases the likelihood that someone will be shot.  But violent criminals are not like the rest of us.  They have very poor impulse control, and, well, a demonstrated willingness to use violence.  They also are not likely to apply for a permit before packing heat.

Read it.

I got your government-run health care system, right here.

Read it.

The 48-year-old, who can’t be named for legal reasons, is demanding unlimited damages of more than £300,000 from his ex-wife and her lover, for the distress caused and the cost of bringing up the children he believed were his for more than a decade.

Read it.

Read it.

More great news from the British National Health Service that everybody is so eager to bring to America.

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Read it.

Am I right that the Ninth Circuit’s Fourth Amendment decision in United States v. Comprehensive Drug Testing has rendered every computer search warrant that has ever been obtained — and every offsite search — unconstitutional? I’ve been working in this area for over a decade, and I have never heard of a case that satisfies the Ninth Circuit’s new procedural standards.

Read it.

See, conservatives are in the habit of pointing out that when you start handing out money, you start losing track of where it goes (or at least, losing the ability to defend where it goes with a straight face). Whereas the worst thing that can happen when you let people keep their own money is, they do what they want with the money they have earned themselves.

At least Dukakis didn’t cut Willie Horton a check.

Will Wilkinson is always worth reading.

Read it.

Good. Democrats tried this same crap after Paul Wellstone died and it resulted in a Republican Senator for Minnesota.

The only thing I’m likely to do for Ted is to piss on his grave.

Read it.

It’s twue, it’s twue.

Read it.

Affirmative action legislation is no doubt already in the works.

Read it.

Read it.

A series of marking found etched in the Stirling Heads, a set of carvings in one of Scotland’s largest castles, may be 16th century harp music, according to academics.

Watch it.

A peek behind the scenes. It’s hell when the Oppressed Masses don’t play along.

If it’s not a conspiracy, it’s the next best thing.

Read it.

We have the technology.

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More scary stuff creeps in under the radar.

Under current law, taxpayers who lose an argument with the IRS can generally avoid penalties by showing they tried in good faith to comply with the tax law. In a broad range of circumstances, the health-care bill would change the law to impose strict liability penalties for income-tax underpayments, meaning that taxpayers will no longer have the luxury of making an honest mistake. The ability of even the IRS to waive penalties in sympathetic cases would be sharply curtailed.

Last June, the Small Business Council of America sent some compelling tales of woe to Congress, including one in which a 72-year-old owner of a coin operated car wash set up retirement plans for his seven employees and got socked for his good deed with a $900,000 penalty for not reporting the plans properly. The company and its owner are now headed for bankruptcy. In another case, a penalty of $100,000 each was imposed on the six minor children of an owner of a small business in Utah for not filing the right tax forms.

Read it.

A study in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology finds that many more animals have appendixes than was thought, and that the appendix is not merely a remnant of a digestive organ called the cecum. All of which means that the appendix might not be so useless.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

The supreme court in Argentina has ruled that it is unconstitutional to punish people for using marijuana for personal consumption.

This will be interesting.

Read it.

And they’ll probably want a beer.

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Hear, hear. Born of a desire for the government was doing something even if it were wrong (like the TSA), it has no purpose and merely creates another layer of bureaucracy on top of all of the other sedimentary layers of bureaucracy we already have.

Eventually the bottom layers will turn to oil — not that we’ll be allowed to drill….

Read it.

Not that you would know it by listening to the enviro-fascists.

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An interesting external perspective.

Perry’s high-handedness in the cervical cancer vaccine affair and his apparent willingless to rip a corridor through central Texas and to hell with what the existing property owners want disgusted me, and the best thing I can think to say about Hutchinson is that the blocks a place that could have gone to someone worse.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind throwing both of them into a Dumpster, but you go to war with the army you have, not the army you’d like to have.

Read it.

Read it.

The world has too many politicans and not enough mad scientists.

Read it.

When we talk about government policies destroying wealth, we usually mean taxes that shift money from efficient to inefficient uses. Rarely do we mean the deliberate destruction of valuable assets. Yet, thanks to the Cash for Clunkers program, which ground to a halt yesterday, we now have a visual aid to help with this abstract concept. Mechanics tasked with destroying the so-called clunkers have been posting the videos on YouTube, often muttering in anger as they fill the engines of perfectly good Corvettes and Cadillacs with sodium silicate and then run them until they self-destruct. The goal of the Cash for Clunkers policy is, literally, the destruction of wealth.

Our government, our enemy.

Read it.

Can he use a litter box? Can he clean himself? That’s the key.

Gotta love Australians.

Read it.

Of course, pretty soon in France it will only be necessary to say “I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you”, so it doesn’t really matter.

Will Wilkinson is always worth reading.

Here is a good debate proposition: It ought to be less embarrassing to have been influenced by Ayn Rand than by Karl Marx.

Even for those of us who came of age after 1989, Marxism, like cigarettes, remains linked by association to the idea of the intellectual, and so, like cigarettes, shares in the intellectual’s glamour. I don’t know if cigarettes or Marxism have killed more people, but it’s pretty clear cigarettes are more actively stigmatized.

It ought to be embarrassing, but it isn’t.

Watch it.

Megan McArdle is a very strange person.

Foud Ajami nails it.

A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the “loudest voices” are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed.

The Obama devotees were the victims of their own belief in political magic. The devotees could not make up their minds. In a newly minted U.S. senator from Illinois, they saw the embodiment of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Like Lincoln, Mr. Obama was tall and thin and from Illinois, and the historic campaign was launched out of Springfield. The oath of office was taken on the Lincoln Bible. Like FDR, he had a huge economic challenge, and he better get it done, repair and streamline the economy in his “first hundred days.” Like JFK, he was young and stylish, with a young family.