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In thinking that you and I are one of Walter Alvarez’s “astronomically improbables,” it’s only a small mental step to realizing who else, specifically, had to be too.

Other names begin to crowd the head, in no particular order. Roosevelt. And Churchill. Tojo and Patton. Submit your own favorites to be grateful — or ungrateful — for.

Don’t laugh yet. Read it first.

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Looks as if the world is waking up.

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I’m glad someone besides me has noticed that.

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According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, consumers often quit using products that would be beneficial for them in the long run because they experience a short period of pessimism during their initial encounter with skill-based products as varied as knitting needles and mobile devices.

Steve Sailer has a lot of fun with this one.

Here are some excerpts from Duncan’s speech:

President Obama called on the nation’s governors and state education chiefs “to develop standards and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.”

You know your chain is being yanked when you hear that schoolteachers are supposed to teach “21st century skills” like “entrepreneurship.” So, schoolteachers are going to teach kids how to be Steve Jobs?

Look, there are a lot of good things to say about teachers, but, generally speaking, people who strive for union jobs with lifetime tenure and summers off are not the world’s leading role models on entrepreneurship.

Further, whenever you hear teachers talk about how they teach “critical thinking,” you can more or less translate that into “I hate drilling brats on their times tables. It’s so boring.” On the whole, teachers aren’t very good critical thinkers. If they were, Ed School would drive them batty.

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“These [floating nuclear power stations] have very good potential, creating the conditions for exploring the Arctic shelf and setting up drilling platforms to extract oil and gas,” says Sergey Zavyalov, deputy director of the operating company, Rosenergoatom.

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Measured in terms of median revenues per ex-staffer turned lobbyist, this estimate indicates that the exit of a Senator leads to approximately a $177,000 per year fall in revenues for each affiliated lobbyist….We also find evidence that ex-staffers are more likely to leave the lobbying industry after their connected Senator or Representative exits Congress.

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Especially fervent in the United States, the enthusiasm has been described as forming a “Bacon Nation”.

We got it.

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That would certainly be interesting.

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Time Warner Cable and Cablevision pay the city 5% of revenue from all cable subscriptions sold to residents in exchange for the right to run their wires along city streets. With 1.9 million households paying for cable, the deal generates about $110 million for the city each year, according to Bruce Regal, a senior lawyer at the city Law Department and one of the negotiators working on the new cable contract.

So the new deal with Time Warner Cable and Cablevision contains something different: an escape clause for the city. If fees from cable-TV sales drop more than 22.5% as consumers shift to Internet video, the ten-year contract will be terminated and the city will be free to renegotiate the terms. The provision is the first of its kind in a municipal contract with cable companies, city officials said.

Replacing the cable-subscription fees would prove tricky, as the 5% regime is enshrined in federal regulations that expressly prohibit cities from collecting fees on other products sold by cable companies, such as Internet and telephone services. But city officials believe a ruling by a court or the Federal Communications Commission might alter the existing regulations if and when consumers begin cutting the cord.

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Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com is routinely trotted out as an independent expert. He was the sole economist at the August 17 Treasury Conference on the Future of Housing Finance, the Fed’s REO and Vacant Properties conference and has now testified at the September 22^nd Senate Budget Committee hearing on “Assessing the Federal Policy Response to the Economic Crisis”.

Never mind that, based on Zandi’s record, either his analysis is just wrong or his independence is compromised. Everyone seems to like to hear the guy who is saying what people want to hear, even the press appears to prefer “feel good” analysis to considering the accuracy of his record.

Moral: Just because someone is touted as an ‘expert’, even with impressive credentials, doesn’t mean he knows his ass from a hole in the ground.

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It can’t be repeated too often that Muslim men establish dominance over infidel women (or any women not protected by other Muslim men) through rape. In a traditional context, captive non-Muslim women are raped, and then either consigned to slavery or forcibly converted to Islam and married to their rapist.

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Titanium alloy is also used for medical implants, and is well thought of in that role. But it seems that the miracle metal – as strong as steel but half the weight – is inconveniently stiff. The human bone that it replaces is bendier, and superstiff titanium replacements can cause adjacent bones, relieved of loads which would normally be put on them due to their yielding neighbours, to atrophy from lack of work. Also a normal titanium implant, though it often bonds well with the bone it is attached to, can break free.

Not only is titanofoam bendy like a bone, it is also easier for living bone to bond to, according to the remorseless Fraunhofer scientists of the Institut für Fertigungstechnik und Angewandte Materialforschung (IFAM) and the Institut für Keramische Technologien und Systeme (IKTS).

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What do scientists think about seeing their fields of research pulverized by science fiction? We asked researchers from diverse fields to tell us whether any science fiction gets it right.

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I would have guessed it meant ‘fear of not having any homosexuals around’ but I would have been wrong.

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Sharply raising the stakes in a dispute over Japan’s detention of a Chinese fishing trawler captain, the Chinese government has blocked exports to Japan of a crucial category of minerals used in products like hybrid cars, wind turbines and guided missiles.

China mines 93 percent of the world’s rare earth minerals, and more than 99 percent of the world’s supply of some of the most prized rare earths, which sell for several hundred dollars a pound.

Think they wouldn’t do that to the U. S. if the occasion arose?

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Dark patterns are Web site strategies which persuade users into actions they might not normally take.  This includes designs that make starting a subscription service very easy, but leaving it quite difficult; surreptitious additions to a purchase order; sneaky small print arrangements.

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Among the tidbits and outrages revealed in the trailer for Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, Obama’s Wars, two patterns stood out. First, the president really hates being commander in chief in a time of war. Second, and perhaps related, the fight the White House most wants to win is the battle over who gets blamed for a defeat in Afghanistan.

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The New York Times on Sunday devoted more than 1,000 words to an article by two of its staff reporters about what it described as “the brutal, premeditated killings of three Afghan civilians — allegedly at the hands of American soldiers.” Today the Times ran another 1,000-word, staff-written article, on the front-page, about gays in the military. Meanwhile, the president posthumously awards the Medal of Honor to Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Richard Etchberger, and the Times handles it with a 230-word squib from the Associated Press wire service.

Eventually, people in the military are going to get tired of being slimed by their own countrymen, and sooner or later one or more of them are going to resort to what the Special Operations people call ‘direct action’. I would not want to be an employee of the New York Times when that day comes.

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A piercing case in North Carolina is brewing after a 14-year-old high school student received yet another suspension for wearing a nose stud. This isn’t your average rebellious teenager, though. Ariana Iacono and her mother are members of a group called the Church of Body Modification.

‘Church of Body Modification’? (I am not making this up….)

Ivey describes the church as a non-theistic faith that draws people who see tattoos, piercings and other physical alterations as ways of experiencing the divine.

“We don’t worship the god of body modification or anything like that,” he said. “Our spirituality comes from what we choose to do ourselves. Through body modification, we can change how we feel about ourselves and how we feel about the world.”

In other words, it’s a transparent scam to sweep body modifications under the rug of religion so as to get the benefit of the whole ACLU-iverse.

One of the major disadvantage of government-run schools is that they are famously vulnerable to this sort of system-gaming. For example:

In 1999, a federal court in North Carolina ruled that the Halifax County school system had violated such hybrid rights of Catherine Hicks and her great-grandson by forcing the boy to wear a school uniform.

Hicks’ religious beliefs held that uniformity is linked to the anti-Christ, a belief Halifax schools rejected. But the court ruled in her favor, and ordered the school system to include a religious exemption in its dress code policy.

The Other McCain pulls no punches.

Not since Americans were intoduced to the term “Scozzafava” (a synonym for two-faced backstabber) has any new hipster phrase caught on as quickly as “Murkowski,” meaning selfish bitch.

And that says pretty much all that needs to be said on the subject.

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After Donald Berwick’s controversial recess appointment to head the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), his allies claimed that he was preparing a “point-by-point” rebuttal to his critics. Berwick does have a lot of explaining to do, after all.

He’s publically romanticized Britain’s government-run healthcare and is on the record arguing that most cities should ration the “number of centers engaging” in “cardiac surgery,” “neonatal intensive care” and “cancer care.”

It’s been three months now since his recess appointment, and still no word from the new CMS director. In fact, Berwick hasn’t granted any interviews, refuses to testify before Congress, and doesn’t take any questions at public events.

To put this in perspective, Donald Berwick oversees the healthcare spending for one-in-three Americans and, as the New York Times put it, “has a budget bigger than the Pentagon’s.”

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Until the government gets involved, of course. But life is a constant process of trying to keep ahead of government efforts to screw it up.

Yes, the economy is in atrocious shape. Yes, what’s happening has terrible real-life consequences for millions. But why is it that the worst Chicken Littles are always running for office?

Because they’re after money and power, and the way to money and power is to proclaim loudly that there’s trouble in River City. Duh.

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It’s not a surprise at all. Republicans in Congress have always been spineless when dealing with betrayal in their own ranks. The Crust takes care of its own.

Read it. And watch the video.

You must admit that it does have a certain symmetry.

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Dan Klein and David Hedengren have a piece at Cato on economists signing petitions. One of their basic findings is how little overlap there is between the group of economists who sign anti-freedom petitions and the group who sign pro-freedom petitions.

Perhaps that’s because, despite its devotion to numerical methods, economics isn’t really a science.

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DETROIT—The Motor City has lots of drafty houses and tens of thousands of unemployed people. So when Congress proposed spending $5 billion to insulate homes as part of the stimulus bill, Detroit got excited. The director of the city agency managing the program advertised for construction companies before the legislation even passed.

But on the same day in March 2009 that Shenetta Coleman picked up applications from 46 companies, she received an email from the Michigan Department of Human Services telling her she couldn’t award work to anyone.

The problem: Ms. Coleman hadn’t met requirements for her advertisement. Those included specifying the precise wages that contractors would have to pay, and posting the advertisement on a specific website. There were other rules—federal, state and local—for grant and contract-award processes, historic preservation and labor standards.

The bureaucratic obstacles Ms. Coleman hit took more than a year to clear. Some were mandated by the stimulus bill, the same legislation that was supposed to rapidly create jobs. For example, there is a union-backed provision that requires that weatherization workers receive the prevailing wages in the area.

Now, imagine the government in charge of your health care….

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This barbaric practice finds sanction in Islamic law’s provision that if a parent kills his child, he is not subject to retribution — hence the relaxed penalties for honor killings in some Islamic countries.

“I don’t say that I wish I hadn’t killed her, but I say I wish she hadn’t done that,” he said.

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If Dikotter’s figures are correct, this makes Mao by far the greatest mass murderer in world history, surpassing the death tolls “achieved” by Stalin and Hitler. Previous estimates of Mao’s death toll still numbered in the tens of millions, but were “low” enough to make it difficult to tell whether or not he had killed more people than Stalin.

Not really a surprise, but a useful reminder.

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Jarhead Red is a wine on a mission to support the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation. True to its name, Jarhead Red boasts a robust character with rich black fruit flavors and a finish that doesn’t quit. This is the 10th vintage of Jarhead Red since the inaugural vintage of 1999.

I find the entire concept absolutely delightful.

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It was always thought the Titanic sank because its crew were sailing too fast and failed to see the iceberg before it was too late.

But now it has been revealed they spotted it well in advance but still steamed straight into it because of a basic steering blunder.

According to a new book, the ship had plenty of time to miss the iceberg but the helmsman panicked and turned the wrong way.

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At first blush, it’s a familiar story: A small-town girl beats the odds to win fame and fortune at a beauty pageant. But the twist is that the small town of Anysha Panesar, newly crowned America’s Perfect Teen, is not in America at all — and that has some folks up in arms.

Anysha, 16, hails from Llangan, Wales — some 3,500 miles from U.S. shores. While on a family vacation in Kissimmee, Fla., last month, she entered the America’s Perfect Teen pageant on a whim. But lo and behold, when the winner was announced, she was the last young woman standing among 30 contestants.

Had she been Mexican — or Somalian — nobody would have dared say anything.

The pageant’s sponsors also had a few choice words for its founder, Michael Galanes, who steadfastly maintains the right girl won America’s Perfect Teen — even if she doesn’t happen to be American. “There really is no reason for any sort of uproar,” Galanes told NBC’s Michelle Kosinski. “You know how you say, that girl had ‘it’? Well, she truly did.”

We’ve always said that being an American is an attitude, not an ethnicity. This just proves it.

Anysha said she’s going to put her scholarship money to good use; after completing high school in Wales, she plans to relocate to the U.S. to study broadcasting. In fact, she is already in talks to launch her own reality TV show about her year as America’s Perfect Teen’s reigning queen.

There are many people in this world who are Americans at heart; they just haven’t gotten here yet. She’s obviously one of them.

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A court has ruled that women’s nipples do not enjoy freedom of expression under the US Constitution.

The case was brought by a 16 year old girl, who was one of three women accused of exposing their breasts to passing traffic on an Indianapolis street last year.

According to the Indiana Star, Judge Cale Bradford wrote, “In the end, (the girl) would have us declare by judicial fiat that the public display of fully-uncovered female breasts is no different than the public display of male breasts, when the citizens of Indiana, speaking through their elected representatives, say otherwise. This we will not do.”

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A highly sophisticated computer worm that has burrowed into industrial systems worldwide over the past year may have been a “search-and-destroy weapon” built to take out Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor, according to news reports published on Tuesday.

The articles from IDG News and The Christian Science Monitor said the Stuxnet worm was programmed to probe the hosts it infected for extremely specific settings. Unless it identified the hardware fingerprint it was looking for in industrial software systems made by Siemens, it remained largely dormant.

It was only after a unique configuration on a Programmable Logic Controller device was detected that Stuxnet took action. Under those circumstances, the worm made changes to a piece of Siemens code called Operational Block 35, which monitors critical factory operations, according to IDG, which cited Eric Byres, CTO of a firm called Byres Security.

Both reports said the sophistication of Stuxnet suggests Israel or some other nation state is behind the worm and both articles cited speculation by Langner that the intended target may have been Iran’s Bushehr reactor, located about 750 miles from Tehran, that is under construction. The project faced reported delays around the same time Stuxnet is believed to have propagated, and the plant is believed to use the Windows-based Siemens software targeted in the attacks, IDG said.

Everybody keeps forgetting that Jews breed for intelligence.

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Why not? It gives him a lot of bragging rights, and won’t touch his daily life at all.

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But I thought the Europeans all wanted to ride the trains?

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Some of the country’s most prominent health insurance companies have decided to stop offering new child-only plans, rather than comply with rules in the new health-care law that will require such plans to start accepting children with preexisting medical conditions after Sept. 23.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

“We’re just days away from a new era when insurance companies must stop denying coverage to kids just because they are sick, and now some of the biggest changed their minds,” Ethan Rome, executive director of Health Care for America Now, an advocacy group, said in a statement. “[It] is immoral, and to blame their appalling behavior on the new law is patently dishonest.”

Insurance companies exist, you see, so that nobody ever has to pay for his or her own health care. Funny how the insurance companies just obstinately refuse to recognize this simple fact.

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For two years Onyango said she lived in a homeless shelter, before she was assigned public housing despite thousands of legal residents also awaiting assistance. “I didn’t take any advantage of the system. The system took advantage of me.”

“I didn’t ask for it; they gave it to me. Ask your system. I didn’t create it or vote for it. Go and ask your system,” she said unapologetically.

In 2004 a judge ordered Zeituni Onyango out of the country, but she never left. She stayed, hiding in plain site. In 2005 she attended her nephew’s swearing in as the junior Senator of Illinois. In 2008 she was invited to, and traveled to D.C. for President Obama’s inauguration….

Onyango hired a top immigration lawyer from Cleveland to help fight her case. We asked how she afforded that lawyer, when she claimed poverty.

“When you believe in Jesus Christ and almighty God, my help comes from heaven,” she responded….She is still living in South Boston public housing, unemployed, and collecting about $700 a month in disability, she says. And now, Zeituni Onlyango is in this country legally.

Life in the Obama Nation is pretty sweet — for the leeches.

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Go, granny, go.

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Even the Brits can see it.

Check it out.

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What is particularly striking is that most of the women who have these powerful emotional reactions to their abortion are stunned by them. They were not opposed to abortion; many were actively pro-choice. They were blind-sided by their own reaction. One woman lamented—and thousands of others echo her mystified anguish—“If this was the right decision, why do I feel so terrible?”

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Common sense seeps into the New York Times. Read it before it is expunged.