Read it.

Genetic testing of villagers in a remote part of China has shown that nearly two thirds of their DNA is of Caucasian origin, lending support to the theory that they may be descended from a ‘lost legion’ of Roman soldiers.

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My question is: If she were white or Asian, would they care quite as much?

Turns out, there’s an app for that.

Everything was gone — all her contacts, photos and even the phone’s ability to make calls.

It was only after she got home to Silicon Valley that she found out that her phone had been killed by her employer, a publishing company.

Someone in the IT department had sent out what’s called a “remote wipe,” a kind of auto-destruct command that’s delivered by e-mail. The wipe was done by mistake, and Stanton wouldn’t have been surprised to see this kind of remote control on a company phone.

But this iPhone was hers.

“It was my account, in my name [and] I’d paid all the bills,” Stanton says. “It didn’t make any sense to me that somehow work could get through AT&T, who I thought controlled my phone, and could completely disable the phone and the account.”

The phone doesn’t need to download any new software. All that’s necessary is for the phone’s user to configure it to receive e-mail from a Microsoft Exchange Server — the kind most big companies use.

Once that’s been set up, an IT department has the capability to wipe the phone and turn off functions like Bluetooth, the Web browser and even the phone’s camera.

Read it.

For years, we’ve pointed out how rather insidious it is to refer to copyright and patents as “property,” as it leads to those who support traditional property rights to default to supporting these government-granted monopoly privileges as if they were property.

I’ve always been of opinion that ‘intellectual property’ was an intellectual handjob, like ‘social justice’. The essence of property if you’ve got it, nobody else has it, or can have it, and that just doesn’t apply to information.

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You know it had to happen. Besides, ‘shop’ is something that Third World countries do, these days.

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Doctors who own independent practices sometimes band together to provide a bulk offering of services, at a collectively negotiated rate, for third-party payers such as large health insurance carriers. These groups are called “independent practice associations,” or IPAs, and they’ve been around since the 1950s. IPAs provide tangible value for physicians and patients alike: Doctors get a middleman to deal with the insurance bureaucracies, and patients get access to a wide range of health care providers at discounted prices. But thanks to the ever-expanding mission of antitrust regulators, the associations are also under constant attack from the federal government.

And these are the people that the Obamanation want to run our health care. Sweet.

Read it.

So Chen, 30, is one of an increasing number of mainland Chinese women who are taking advantage of a loophole in American law to travel to the United States to give birth.

“Most Chinese women who go to the U.S. to give birth do so for their child’s future, for the education, and for the work possibilities. And that’s true for me, too,” says Chen, who is cautious and does not to want to reveal her identity.

“We just want to give him more choices in life,” Chen adds.

Better hurry up — Democrats are working frantically to reduce the choices Americans have.

Jerry Pournelle discusses the TSA kerfuffle.

The purpose of the TSA is to make it clear that Americans are subjects, not citizens; at least it has operated as if that were the mission from its beginning. The X-Ray machine are expensive, and I suspect that if you trace the profits made from the government’s buying them you will find paths to lobbyists involved with those who made the policies. Given the profits involved, I would not be astonished to find that donations to al Qaeda from people who make profits from those machines. Stranger things have happened.

There is a story that one chap stripped to his underwear. They required him to put his clothes back on before doing the pat down. I don’t know if that story is true, but it certainly would not be astonishing. It’s just routine, Ma’am. This is the new normal. You wanted change, didn’t you?

Read it.

The NY Times says that the picture book for children is disappearing, largely because so many aspirant middle-class parents are pushing their children aggressively towards reading chapter books early in life, and receiving some endorsement in this move from teachers who need to prepare students to deal with No Child Left Behind-inspired testing programs.

Expert authority may have much less influence in American public life today than it did in 1960, but one segment of the population is still intensely glued to what experts recommend or demand: the professionalized middle classes, who exist in a state of perpetual anxiety about social reproduction. They want to know one thing: what must they do to secure a steady, reliable future for their children in which their children will do jobs and have status approximately commensurate with their parents (or better)?

When experts in education, childhood, psychology, economics, what have you, venture forth into the public sphere to say that our schools are failing to do something utterly essential, or that tomorrow’s children must absolutely have some skill that they do not have now, or that oh my GOD SWEDEN and CHINA and ARGENTINA all have started teaching children how to program in Java while they are still in the WOMB, you know what that’s the equivalent of? It’s like going up to someone who is starting to develop a dissassociative identity disorder and pretending to be one of those little voices from a satellite that he’s hearing that tell him that everyone’s out to drain his precious bodily fluids.

Middle-class parenting is precisely where expertise and the authority of both state and civic institutions often have their most toxic intersection, and where unintended effects blossom like ragweed in September. The double vulnerability of those parents is especially intense now: as they lose many of their most treasured markers of social difference, they’re also waking up to just how much economic ground they’ve lost in the last two decades, and how much likelier their children are to continue that downward mobility.

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Mr. Buffett says, “I think that people at the high end — people like myself — should be paying a lot more in taxes.” Nothing is stopping him from doing so voluntarily. But instead he has structured his affairs — low annual salary, lots of unrealized long-term capital gains, a big charitable foundation to get around the estate tax — so as to minimize his taxes.

As I never cease to point out, when wealthy people call for ‘higher taxes on the rich’ they mean ‘higher taxes for the rich who aren’t rich enough to afford the sort of tax advice I can’. They’re talking about people who make their money in the form of ordinary income, who are becoming seriously annoying by crowding the best restaurants and resorts rather than leaving them to superrich people — like Warren Buffet (and Bill Gates).

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This is huge.

(And, once again, mice get all the good stuff.)

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There must be a special bureaucrat school that they go to for this sort of thing.

Attention! Attention! Common sense has left the building!

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

It’s getting harder and harder to distinguish between jihadists and environmentalists.

Read it.

Reason magazine is having entirely too much fun with the Theater of Security Administration.

Joe Wikert has some interesting thoughts.

First, Google is under attack from every angle.  Sure, they’ve felt competitive pressures before but whether it’s from Facebook, Bing or some startup in a garage, I get the impression it’s more intense now than ever before.  No wonder they’re giving all employees a 10% pay raise!  Seriously, search is getting more social every day and tomorrow’s recommendations from people you know via Facebook are infinitely more valuable than search results from yesterday’s algorithm.

That brings me to my second key takeaway from Web 2.0: The importance of a social strategy for every industry, inculding publishing.  I can already hear the skeptics saying, “reading is a time of solitude, not something that’s done socially.”  That’s mostly right, but it ignores at least two key areas where a social strategy can have a profound impact on the publishing industry: recommendations and remixes.

Jeremy Wagstaff is always worth reading.

Counting the number of followers a candidate has on Facebook, for example, is apparently a pretty good indicator of whether they’ll do well at the ballot box. The Daily Beast set up something called the Oracle which scanned 40,000 websites—including Twitter—to measure whether comments on candidates in the recent U.S. elections were positive, negative, neutral or mixed. It predicted 36 out of 37 Senate races and 29 out of 30 Governors’ races and nearly 98% of the House races. That’s pretty good.

Read it.

* Evidence gathered by Lebanese police and, much later, the UN, points overwhelmingly to the fact that the assassins were from Hezbollah, the militant Party of God that is largely sponsored by Syria and Iran. CBC News has obtained cellphone and other telecommunications evidence that is at the core of the case.

* UN investigators came to believe their inquiry was penetrated early by Hezbollah and that that the commission’s lax security likely led to the murder of a young, dedicated Lebanese policeman who had largely cracked the case on his own and was co-operating with the international inquiry.

* UN commission insiders also suspected Hariri’s own chief of protocol at the time, a man who now heads Lebanon’s intelligence service, of colluding with Hezbollah. But those suspicions, laid out in an extensive internal memo, were not pursued, basically for diplomatic reasons.

But, of course, that can’t be, because Islam is a Religion o’ Peace™, right?

Read it.

Nanny State, Education Division.

Slow news day.

This is the sort of ADD topic that NPR does best. Would that it restricted itself to this, its core competency.

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My own suspicion is that when people think that greed explains the financial crisis, they’re falling for a lazy explanation, akin to seeing a car blow up and “explaining” it by saying that there was oxygen present.

My friend agreed, but asked: “Are current laws against corruption really adequate, or are there useful opportunities for reform? Is our system of greed-channeling incentives rightly constructed? Doesn’t the behavior of the banks before, during and since the crisis demonstrate that in fact we are not channeling the right incentives?”

Those are just the right kinds of questions. Greed is a moral and spiritual problem, and its solutions are also moral and spiritual. But economically, what we want is to make sure that whether someone is acting out of greed, legitimate self-interest, or whatever, they don’t have incentives to destroy the financial system. If financial reforms require that no banker ever be greedy, however, we’re doomed.

Excellent thoughts.

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The new, updated, Politically Correct Ebenezer Scrooge.

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Well, it probably has fewer Muslim extremists, for one thing.

For another, the Good Guys are allowed to shoot back. That’s always a plus.

Lynn Viehl is always worth reading.

Chocolate. Not only can’t I eat it because it’s not part of my heart-healthy twigs-and-bark diet, but I then have to give it to someone else and watch them eat it. Which is when I start sobbing.

Gadget Docking Stations, Accessories, etc. I do not own an iPod, an iPad, an e-reader, a fancy mobile phone or any of that other junk. I have nothing that needs a recharging station, and I don’t want a netbook, a boogie board, a happy light, anything that displays up to ten thousand digital photographs, or that tells me on the hour what the weather is like in Sydney because I can’t figure out how to program it for my time zone.

Grow Your Own! Kits. I’m not especially enamoured of tomatoes that grow upside down, herbs in tiny pots, Chia pets or ugly brown bulbs that are supposed to produce gorgeous flowers but no matter how carefully I follow the directions only remain ugly brown bulbs.

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

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Works for me. It would solve a lot of problems.

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So I guess the manual will be retitled ‘Recycling for Boys’. The Great Game is become the Great Video Game.

That sound you hear is from Kenya; no doubt they will use Lord Baden-Powell’s spinning corpse as a source of renewable energy.

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Iowa’s outgoing Democrat Governor Chet Culver gave his union buddies at AFSCME a true ’sweetheart deal’ on Friday—a two-year contract worth $200 million taken from Iowa’s taxpayers.

The funny thing is, Culver didn’t even bother to negotiate a better deal for the state’s taxpayers. In fact, Culver didn’t bother to negotiate at all.  Instead, Culver took what was asked for by AFSCME and put it into effect leaving the next administration (and taxpayers) to deal with it.

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As they do so many negative aspects of life.

On the other hand, although I can think of many arguments in favor of throwing Congressmen in jail, I can’t think of any for making them go through airport security; I doubt that any of them are going to hijack the plane and fly it into the White House. (More’s the pity; I would vote for such a person.)

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Lord Justice Leveson called for new research to be carried out to ensure fingerprinting is “robust” and reliable.

“There is growing unease among fingerprint examiners and researchers that the century old fingerprint identification process rests on assumptions that have never been tested empirically,” he said.

Speaking about the use of expert evidence in court cases, the senior judge said it was vital to have a “methodology and a hypothesis that are capable of withstanding robust testing”.

“Arguably, as it currently stands, the science of fingerprint identification does not,” he added.

He’s right. The premise that fingerprints are unique is merely an assumption, indulged in for the sake of convenience.

Read it.

An odd thing to see on NPR. Usually they’re a reality-free environment.

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From the most deserving recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize comes… the most deserving recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom! John Sweeney, President Emeritus of the AFL-CIO, can now boast the nation’s highest civilian honor.

What exactly has John Sweeney done to warrant this award for freedom? Well, about as much as Obama did for peace his first few weeks in office.

Erick Erickson smells blood in the water.

100% NARAL rated Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, the Republican who relied on Democrats to get into his job and then obstructed major conservative reforms in the Texas House of Representatives, is worried he might be voted off the island.

For the Speaker of the Texas House to be calling a blogger from Georgia to, I assume, convince me he is not the 100% NARAL rated and Planned Parenthood praised Democrat in Republican clothing that I know him to be, must mean we are having an impact and he is worried.

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One guess as to whether an Iranian naval vessel would have rendered equivalent assistance to two American mariners in distress.

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Experts dissecting the computer worm suspected of being aimed at Iran’s nuclear program have determined that it was precisely calibrated in a way that could send nuclear centrifuges wildly out of control.

Their conclusion, while not definitive, begins to clear some of the fog around the Stuxnet worm, a malicious program detected earlier this year on computers, primarily in Iran but also India, Indonesia and other countries.

The paternity of the worm is still in dispute, but in recent weeks officials from Israel have broken into wide smiles when asked whether Israel was behind the attack, or knew who was. American officials have suggested it originated abroad.

We have the technology.

Wonder what it’s like to be an Israeli, and have a government that knows its ass from a hole in the ground?

Read it.

News from the Islamic Republic of Sweden.

This incident took place at Örebro University Hospital in Sweden two weeks ago. According to René Bangshöj, head of the women’s clinic, the assaulted doctor had been called in to help a woman who had just given birth and who then underwent heavy bleeding.

“When the doctor came in, he was met by angry screaming: ‘We do not want a male doctor at the childbirth room’,” Bangshöj said to Swedish Radio in Örebro.

The doctor, however, took his medical vow seriously, and went towards the woman. That made her husband go berserk, and he violently attacked the doctor to stop him from touching his bleeding wife.

“And at the same time the woman’s brother came into the room and attacked the doctor from behind,” Bangshöj told the reporter. “The doctor tried to protect himself against the punches and kicks, but the two foreigners nevertheless gave him a sharp kick in the groin,” he said to Swedish Radio.
Several staff members had already alerted the police, who came in large numbers and had the two violent men quickly removed. Then the woman finally could be taken to the surgery room, and she was saved in spite of it all.

Read it.

As a regulatory arm of the USDA, GIPSA is tasked with overseeing the trade of various meats, grains, and other agricultural products.  As an attorney in the Butler Farm and Ranch Law Group in Canton, Mississippi, Mr. Butler filed multiple lawsuits against poultry companies for alleged irregular and illegal business practices.  These suits met with limited success because of pre-existing GIPSA regulations.  Now, having been made Administrator of GIPSA by President Obama, Mr. Butler is changing the troublesome regulations to favor plaintiff’s attorneys, whose ranks may well again include him after his stint in public office.  This underhanded policy scheme was shoehorned into a GIPSA rulemaking mandated by the 2008 Farm Bill; straying from the proposed content on “undue preferences,” Mr. Butler wedged language into the final rule that opens the door to broader and more profitable litigation in the future.  Mr. Butler, to his credit, has been quite open as to what this regulation will accomplish:

“When you have a term like ‘unfair, unreasonable or undue prejudice,’ that’s a plaintiff lawyer’s dream. We can get in front of a jury with that. We won’t get thrown out on what we call summary judgment because that’s a jury question.

Eric Raymond sees the light.

Welcome ashore, Eric. It’s pretty amusing to see all the Big Name People come to the same conclusion I came to ten years ago.

Read it.

Read it.

Fisking New York Times columnists is usually about as challenging as correcting sixth-grade English papers for grammar and spelling, but it can be fun.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is out with a piece headlined “A Hedge Fund Republic?”

He writes, “inequality in the United States has soared to levels comparable to those in Argentina six decades ago — with 1 percent controlling 24 percent of American income in 2007.”

Mr. Kristof uses the word “controlling” rather than “earning” so as not to allow his readers to consider the possibility that these earners might have done something such as work to create value so that customers were willing to pay them that compensation voluntarily.

The major problem is, of course, that most Crustian opinion-mongers are stuck at 1900 and are under the impression that the reason rich people are rich is because their ancestors stole something from somebody sometime and just inherited it. (After all, why is the opinion-monger not rich, being so obviously more deserving? Must be a plot on somebody’s part.)

Remember when Newt Gingrich brought up the subject of orphanages and Hillary Clinton went all Charles Dickens on him? Nobody bothered to tell her that the stuff Dickens wrote about was (a) stuff he made up and (b) a hundred and fifty years ago. And the reason for that is (c) they all believe the same way she does, that absolutely no progress has been made in the past century and a half–we still have people starving in the streets (despite welfare programs that allow poor people to get morbidly obese), black people being lynched (despite affirmative action programs that put the likes of Charlie Rangel and Barack Obama in positions of power), and workers being paid just pennies a day (despite unionized auto assembly line people who make more than a lot of lawyers and accountants).

That’s why they want to get rid of automobiles and planes and go back to horses, bicycles, and trains; it’s where they feel most comfortable.

Read it.

Isn’t that just the most awesome title for a PhD dissertation ever? Seems a pity to waste it on a blog post.

Assume that you are a student applying to college.  Assume also that your high school has a declared policy limiting the number of schools to which you can apply.  It says it does so in order that you will “take applying seriously.”

You rather suspect that the school does so in order to be able to push particular students it favors for particular colleges, so that too many students do not create too much “noise” and competition for a place that the high school counselor thinks is most competitively filled by a particular student.  The high school’s incentive, in other words, is first to maximize its ability to get students into particular colleges as an institution seeing the students as a school cohort, not to simply support each student in his or her efforts on an individual basis.  One effect of this is to favor students who come from wealthy, powerful, or highly connected legacy families, since those students are most likely in the first place to be able to get into the most competitive schools.  But although you suspect this, it is rather difficult to prove without something like discovery in a lawsuit to find out exactly on whose behalf the counselors call certain colleges and discourage other students from applying at all.

But it’s a very interesting blog post….

Bryan Caplan bares his soul. Sort of.

At yesterday’s lunch, Tyler asked us to name the most important lesson we learned from the crisis of 2008.  My answer: The Fed is much worse than I thought.  I used to think we could trust an economist of Bernanke’s caliber to deliver tolerably good macro performance using inflation targeting – and avoid giving barbarous politicians the excuse to push bailouts and “fiscal stimulus.”  Instead he threw his own principles to the wind, joined the sky-is-falling chorus, and helped end the Great Moderation.

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For Wired magazine, anyway, which appears to find objectionable the possibility that America has a weapon that other countries don’t. The horror, the horror….

John Stossel goes behind the scenes.

It’s not what we don’t know that causes us trouble. It’s what we know that isn’t so.

It’s logical to think that grass-fed steers might be better for the environment, but so often what sounds logical is just wrong.

Don’t believe me? Dr. Jude Capper, an assistant professor of dairy sciences at Washington State University, has studied the data.

Capper said: “There’s a perception out there that grass-fed animals are frolicking in the sunshine, kicking their heels up full of joy and pleasure. What we actually found was from the land-use basis, from the energy, from water and, particularly, based on the carbon footprints, grass-fed is far worse than corn-fed.”

Read it.

Not that he’s doing anything about it.

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How’s this for timing? The same day that Warren Buffett has an op-ed piece in the New York Times commending the government’s “remarkably effective” actions responding to the financial crisis, President Obama announces he’s giving Mr. Buffett the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

What an amazing coincidence. What are the odds?

The Crust takes care of its own. And the Medal of Freedom joins the Nobel Peace Prize as Just Another Upper Crust Cookie.

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The Great Depression occurred on the Fed’s watch, as have several other recessions.  As for price stability, from the Fed’s creation (in 1913) to 1945, the dollar lost 45 percent of its value; between 1945 and 1980 it lost another 78 percent of its value; and between 1980 and today yet another 62 percent of the dollar’s value was inflated away.  All told, during the less than 100 years that the Fed has been charged with keeping the value of the dollar stable, the dollar has lost 95 percent of its value.  This shrinkage in the dollar’s value since 1913 is especially striking in light of the fact that, between 1790 and 1913, the dollar’s value declined by only about 8 percent.*

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In a letter to the Education Department’s inspector general Wednesday, Mr. Burr of North Carolina and Mr. Coburn of Oklahoma cited public documents indicating the proposed rules were leaked to short-sellers. The department, they wrote, “may have leaked the proposed regulations to parties supporting the Administration’s position and investors who stand to benefit from the failure of the proprietary school sector.”

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

Uh, I have a question: Why do we have a Federal Department of Education? Supposedly we have a Federal government of explicitly enumerated powers; I don’t find any mention of ‘education’ in the Constitution.

More to the point: How many people has the Department of Education actually educated?

The schools have ramped up lobbying efforts against the regulations, which would require career colleges and training programs to prove they’re preparing students for gainful employment.

Whoa — there’s a hole with no bottom. Take a look at most PhD programs. I’d like to see some proof that they’re ‘preparing students for gainful employment’. We could start with Harvard. We could start with Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, Fashionable-Buzzword-of-the-Moment Studies, and any academic program that FDR never heard of.

For-profit universities have come under scrutiny because they receive federal dollars through financial aid programs, and critics say students are often left with big debts and little education.

Uh, I have a question: Why are there ‘federal dollars’ for ‘financial aid programs’, except maybe for veterans? Where is that in the Constitution?

Read it.

Uh, I have a question: Why does the Federal government have a ‘Secretary of Transportation’ at all? Supposedly the Federal government is a government of explicitly enumerated powers — I don’t see any mention of ‘transportation’ in the Constitution.

I’d be much happier if we had somebody looking into technology to disable Washington bureaucrats.