Read it.

Cornish food manufacturers have won a nine-year battle to win special protection for their most famous snack, banning any products made in Devon, Wales or the rest of Britain from being called Cornish pasties.

And, perhaps, relieving those outside of Cornwall from any necessity of eating them.

Read it.

Assuming Dodd takes the role, he’s already proving himself to be perfect for a Hollywood job, because it makes him a blatant liar. Last summer, Dodd insisted that he would not become a lobbyist. He made this abundantly clear. When asked what he would do, he was explicit: “No lobbying, no lobbying.” Yeah, apparently a million dollar plus salary makes you a liar barely a month after leaving the job. Of course, technically, Dodd is also barred from becoming a lobbyist for two years after leaving the Senate, but there’s a kind of *wink, wink, nudge, nudge* trick that Dodd and others use to technically claim they’re not lobbyists while merely running one of the bigger and most high profile lobbying organizations around.

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

Read it.

It’s sad, but what puzzles me most is how in the world three of the four physicians I can identify from these videos and other media reports are faculty members of UW’s Family Medicine department, and one is a senior resident in that same department. It’s a good training program, committed to providing sorely-needed primary care doctors to the state of Wisconsin. It teaches professionalism, and its faculty are supposed to model integrity. What were they thinking?

They’ve managed to belittle a public trust between physicians, employers and patients. A doctor’s sick note is a serious document. It represents an employer’s desire to verify through a respected, independent, medically qualified third party the fact of an illness and the true need for convalescence. In the videos now circulating online, we witness multiple members of a noted family medicine department trash one of the well-recognized rights and privileges of their profession, with little forethought as to the consequences.

UW’s doctors have demeaned not only the doctor-patient relationship, but in so doing, risked the stature doctors hold in our discourse on public policy. When commenting on social issues, physicians trade on the honor of our profession, benefiting from the public’s assumption that the wisdom won of caring for so many at their most vulnerable imbues us with some privileged understanding of collective need.

“Ethics? We don’t need no stinkin’ ethics!”

Read it.

There is a movement afoot to assemble the funds, Kickstarter-fashion, to enable Nathan Fillian to buy the rights to Firefly.

Take whatever action you think appropriate.

Freeberg has a checklist.

This would actually be pretty useful. I think I may try this next time I see a movie.

Read it.

Considering that Obama is President, I’d phrase that the other way around, but I’m prepared to believe it.

Read it.

The workforce of the Internal Revenue Service currently consists of over 93,000 employees to collect and process tax returns and enforce tax laws. While this number is daunting in and of itself, the IRS recently released its new budget which calls for an additional 1,056 new IRS employees citing specifically the new demands placed on the agency due to the new healthcare law. Beyond just more employees the burden of the healthcare law would require more facilities and new systems to handle the task; U.S. News and World Report put the cost to taxpayers at over $359 million in fiscal year 2012 alone.

Read it.

And about fargin time, too.

Universities in Texas are set to be forced to allow students and academics to carry guns on campus, in a victory for a firearms lobby unbowed after last month’s massacre in Arizona.

A massacre that wouldn’t have happened if people in the crowd had been armed.

Read it.

What’s more, while this particular test didn’t actually involve blowing anything up, the Navy seems confident that the laser will eventually be able to do just that, as it’s just recently awarded Boeing a $163 million contract to package the laser in a weapons system that would be deployed on ships and be able to detect, track, and destroy missiles (or presumably anything else ). According the Office of Naval Research, the Navy hopes to meet that goal by 2015.

Read it.

When there aren’t any Jews or Americans handy, Muslims will quite cheerfully blow each other up.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Engadget has the skinny.

They are to be called Prii — not Priuses, not Priuples, not Boring Cars. Just Prii. Remember it.

Read it.

Computer Science is an odd discipline when it comes to job interviews for software developers. Specifically, all interviewees are expected to write code on the whiteboard, irrespective of their background and experience. Let’s assume that I get to interview for a job at Google (which will be a very real possibility if I fail to get tenure). Like a fresh college grad, I will be asked to write code on the whiteboard. The fact that I have close to 15 years of combined industrial and academic experience as well as more than 40 peer reviewed, technical publications will not make any difference. I will have to ask questions like: “How would you remove a node from a doubly linked list?” “How can you find all the neighboring links using a heap?” The fact that I have been teaching these skills to undergraduates for more than five years will be ignored completely. Purportedly, some academics who have not written much code in a while claim to hesitate even applying for a job with Google for that reason.

If we are to use a medical analogy, imagine interviewing an experienced (10-15 years on the job) surgeon for a position in a hospital.  Can you imagine asking the surgeon: “What is a scalpel? What kind of scalpels are there?” “Now, cut this cadaver as if you were to perform an appendectomy. Good. Now imagine that there were some complications–show how you’d cut in that case.” I hope you are having a good laugh, because such a situation is unimaginable.

Read it.

France has some 751 “No Go” zones. The French government has labeled these areas “sensitive urban zones” that are dangerous for whites and non-Muslims to enter.

This map shows how these “no go zones” are distributed around France….

It would be interesting to see an equivalent map for places in the U.S.

Read it.

A man was shot dead at a Latvian cinema after eating his popcorn too loudly during a screen of Black Swan, according to reports.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports on the string of cases in which the Supreme Court has reversed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.  As the Enquirer story notes, the Sixth Circuit has batted 0–15 over the past three Supreme Court terms.  This is quite remarkable. No other Circuit has been reversed so consistently over this period.  As I noted here, it’s also quite unusual to see a single Circuit reversed so consistently in a single area, such as criminal procedure and habeas rights, as the Sixth was last term.

One of the significant indicia of American decline is the fact that Federal Appellate Court judges are becoming figures of ridicule. Remember that nobody laughs at you if you aren’t funny.

Read it.

It’s interesting to observe the media engaged in pack-like behavior and worth considering its causes and effects. Sometimes I wonder why the media just stopped covering the mosque in lower downtown Manhattan. Did it go away? No, but the media did.

Media rule of thumb: Christians getting murdered is never news; Muslims feeling insecure is  always news.

The biter bit.

I predict that a Politically Correct conclusions will be arrived at, that they’re no problem.

Still, the fact that they’re even being looked into is sufficiently odd as to be news.

Terry Wogan wants to let sleeping soaps lie.

The Other McCain kicks over a rock and finds — surprise! — Democrat politicians.

Dan Collins at Piece of Work in Progress recounts the story behind the protests in Wisconsin: How Democrats, after losing the November election, called a special lame-duck session in an abortive effort to lock in sweetheart deals for government employee unions. When that didn’t work, Democrats have since tried to prevent Republicans from acting to balance the budget at the expense of government employee unions.

Read it.

British extremist Anjem Choudary – who once said ‘the flag of Islam will fly over the White House’ – has announced he will lead a demonstration calling on Muslims to establish the Sharia law across America.

The rally, planned for March 3, is to take place just weeks after his on-screen row with Fox News presenter Sean Hannity.

Of course, if he were a non-Muslim calling for democracy in a Muslim country, he’d be killed by a mob. Just a little difference between them and us, you see.

Watch it.

If you aren’t familiar with ‘TED talks’, you really ought to be. This is an excellent example.

Read it.

The recalcitrant and impatient human mind works best when not in conflict with the host’s biology. This biology is inseparable from the ineffable effects of one’s immediate neighborhood simply because our neighborhood is an inseparable part of our individual human biology. In many ways, we prideful humans are little more than ants with a sense of humor. Funny enough, no neighborhood worth its salt would exist without the flotsam known as “the family”. In the end, when we order our built environment around proven intellectual and biological history, we reach the professional levels of craftsmanship required by that elevation of spirit known as “culture”. When we fail in this effort, we arrive at, among other things that group-grope commonly referred to as “sprawl” and its half-baked antecedent, the so-called “service economy”. After several decades of debt-inspired consumer hullabaloo, the United States of America is in the late night dream fit of a nightmare called sprawl. It aint, to be precise, “familial”. The word “Fiat” seems to define the modus admirably. A widespread and unsustainably confused mess is the most picturesque evidence. The cult of Globalism is its vanguard and the resulting Potemkin Edifice is now leaking while the band plays on.S

Read it.

THE soldier now known as Towton 25 had survived battle before. A healed skull fracture points to previous engagements. He was old enough—somewhere between 36 and 45 when he died—to have gained plenty of experience of fighting. But on March 29th 1461, his luck ran out.

Towton 25 suffered eight wounds to his head that day. The precise order can be worked out from the direction of fractures on his skull: when bone breaks, the cracks veer towards existing areas of weakness. The first five blows were delivered by a bladed weapon to the left-hand side of his head, presumably by a right-handed opponent standing in front of him. None is likely to have been lethal.

The next one almost certainly was. From behind him someone swung a blade towards his skull, carving a down-to-up trajectory through the air. The blow opened a huge horizontal gash into the back of his head—picture a slit you could post an envelope through. Fractures raced down to the base of his skull and around the sides of his head. Fragments of bone were forced in to Towton 25’s brain, felling him.

Read it.

Who will own the brains of smart cities–citizens or corporations? At stake is an impending massive trove of data, not to mention issues of privacy, services, and inclusion. The battle may be fought in the streets between bands of Jane Jacobs-inspired hacktivists pushing for self-serve governance and a latter-day Robert Moses carving out monopolies for IBM or Cisco instead of the Triborough Bridge Authority. Without a delicate balance between the scale of big companies and the DIY spirit of “gov 2.0” champions, the urban poor could be the biggest losers. Achieving that balance falls to smarter cities’ mayors, who must keep the tech heavyweights in check and “frame an agenda of openness, transparency and inclusivness.”

You have to love an article that fills up your Buzzword Bingo card in the first paragraph. What I find most amusing about such things is the artificial separation it assumes between alleged ‘huge corporations’ like ‘IBM or Cisco’ and us aw-shucks down-home folks like … the Rockefeller Foundation and the ‘Institute for the Future’. How thin and threadbare that curtain is can be seen by looking at the contributors:

The roster of expert contributors comprises a who’s who of ubiquitous computing and gov 2.0 types, including MIT Senseable City Lab director Carlo Ratti, Everyware author Adam Greenfield, the Santa Fe Institute’s Nathan Eagle, Intel Labs Director Genevieve Bell, Microsoft Research’s Jonathan Donner, and San Francisco CIO Chris Vein.

All members in good standing of the Crust, whether from ‘huge corporations’ or their academic/governmental counterparts. The whole emphasis of projects like this is top-down ‘design’ and control, rather than getting these fumblers out of the way of individuals working on market-based solutions to problems of which the top-downers are the primary cause. I am reminded of the scenes from Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the crowd shows up outside of Brian’s house and plead with him to tell them how to think for themselves.

Read it.

We have seen the future of the health care system, and it is the doctors on the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, handing out free sick notes to public sector union members so they can fraudulently collect their pay for missing work.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Let’s see him name the kid ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ and see how long he lasts.

Read it.

Yet another reason to stay away from Facebook.

Megan McArdle thinks it through.

On one level, this is extraordinarily odd–is it really the president’s job to be taking sides in a dispute between Wisconsin’s elected government and its state employees?  But in another way, it’s logical, even necessary.  State governments are where some of the hardest choices about taxes and spending have to be made.  And thanks to a confluence of factors–ObamaCare rules that keep states from cutting Medicaid spending, poorly thought-out pension obligations that are now coming due, crashing revenue thanks to the recession, and in all but one states, a balanced budget requirement–those choices have to be made now.  Wisconsin is facing a $3.6 billion shortfall over the next two years.  The money is going to have to come from somewhere.

Read it.

Why don’t they just sink the damned ship? It’s not as if Israel has any friends to lose. What would happen that isn’t going to happen anyway? It would certainly guarantee that there isn’t another exciting episode in the whole ‘flotilla’ soap opera.

The Germans never put up with this shit. Hell, the British never put up with this shit, back when they had balls.

Read it.

Of course, all ‘planned’ cities are insane. Read Jane Jacobs.

Read it.

Raining reality on the comic book parade.

Read it.

I’m a photographer. I mainly do street photography now, but i still do the odd bit of contract work. I travel with expensive gear though not that much of it. I like to travel light. The INS do not like that. If I turn up with just my camera backpack and a small bag of clean underwear for a one week stay I usually have to spend a lot of time being interrogated for my lack of a huge suitcase. (I guess they suspect I live in the US illegally. Which borders on comical since nobody knows more about my travel patterns than the US government. Besides, my passport is usually filled with stamps that should tell them that I travel a lot and that even if I lived in the US, I spend most of my time flitting around the world)

Paranoid as the INS are, the TSA are even worse. Mostly because they are a huge bureaucracy where nobody seems to be accountable and their on-the-ground personnel are mostly people who had to choose from a range of other low paying jobs. On several occasions I’ve had expensive gear disappear from my carry-on during security checks and last year a TSA agent dropped my Canon 1D Mk3, smashing both the lens and the camera body. No apology, but more importantly: I was never compensated. I’m not rich and that camera (and the lens) was important to my livelihood. An expensive piece of kit lost that meant that I basically didn’t make any money that month.

I’ve been to Russia before the cold war ended. I’ve been all over the middle east. I’ve been to China. I’ve travelled all over Europe. I’ve been to Cuba and I’ve been to Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Nicaragua.

What all of these places have in common is that going there was a far more pleasant experience than going to the US. Yes, you read correctly: going to the US is more unpleasant than going to Soviet era Russia or even Iran 10 years ago. Sure, you sometimes have to bribe people, but at least I’ve not had gear stolen off me during security checks or had people break my gear without at least compensating me.

Welcome to the Obamanation. Bend over and spread ’em.

Read it.

Few people are aware the San Francisco has had a tax provision in its municipal code since 2004 that requires companies to pay a payroll tax on gains from employee stock options. No one pays it, and San Francisco hasn’t enforced it to date, but companies are becoming increasingly agitated that the city may change that policy at any time. The number of high profile and high value startups based in San Francisco – like Twitter and Zynga – may be too big of a temptation for the city to ignore.

We’re hearing that some of the city’s biggest startups are increasingly concerned that the city will start applying its local payroll tax to employee stock options– something even the Federal government doesn’t do. This would create potentially huge costs for startups that they can sidestep simply by moving a few miles to the North, East or South. If enforced, expect an exodus of San Francisco jobs to surrounding areas.

And rightly so. Like the Mafia, governments can’t stand to see other people making money without thinking that they deserve a cut.

Read it.

Crespo wants trains to come to a complete stop while drivers — he says conductors, but the drivers would do it — inspect the tracks for people before moving ahead very slowly. The cost in lost productivity due to slower commutes alone would wipe out the savings in human life and liability payments.

Read it.

I guess high-speed rail isn’t as wonderful as the reactionaries progressives make it out to be. Too bad, Barry.

Read it.

To avoid a vote on a proposal to limit collective bargaining rights in the state of Wisconsin, 14 legislators have fled the state, to an undisclosed location. I am not sure if there is a precedent for this. The reason they crossed state lines was to dodge the Wisconsin police

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, takes a look.

Among innumeracy’s great heroes must be reckoned Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Sir Winston. Shown a column of figures that included decimal points, His Lordship grumbled, “I never could make out what those damn dots meant.” Since Lord Randolph was Chancellor of the Exchequer (i.e., Treasury Secretary) at the time, this may help explain Britain’s subsequent decline.

Read it.

Money flows to those who can afford to buy Congressmen make campaign contributions.

But the amendments are likely to be killed, if not in the House then in the Senate, on the grounds that such changes are “complex” and should be addressed in the next farm bill, due to be negotiated in 2012. The subtext of the message, especially in the Senate, will really be “Get lost; the amendments’ deficit impacts are negligible and, as usual, we don’t want to take any grief from the major farm organizations whose leaderships disproportionately consists of large-scale farm operators and whose members have a regrettable habit of voting.”

Read it.

This interactive map is very cool.

Read it.

Mice get all the good stuff.

Read it.

I’m not even going to speculate.

Read it.

Steve Sailer watches some chickens coming home to roost.

We now mostly just squabble amongst ourselves, minorities v. whites and whites v. whites over who cares about whites least. So these kind of divisions are pretty easy for the Larry Ellisons to manipulate to add a few billions to their net worth.

Read it.

I think of it as evolution in action.

These dead bodies serve a function similar to the heads on spikes above a city gate. However, like the latter, the deterrent effect is less than it might be.

Read it.

Roughly one-fifth of tests that bone and joint specialists order are because a doctor fears being sued, not because the patient needs them, a first-of-its-kind study in Pennsylvania suggests.

Well, duh. Can you blame them?

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Two TSA agents were busted today at Kennedy Airport for stealing $160,000 in cash from bags, authorities said.

Yeah, I feel safer already.

Read it.

Considering how badly Mexico treats illegal immigrants from elsewhere in Latin America — of course, they’d scream bloody murder if the U.S. treated Mexican illegal immigrants that badly — I doubt that this will fly. But you never know.

The Other McCain is outraged.

Maybe Egyptians could use one of Filipovic’s pious lectures about “no means no” and “stop means stop.” I’d probably be accused of some sort of thought-crime if I were to suggest that the spontaneous outburst of savagery against Lara Logan of CBS News says anything about the future course of democracy in Egypt.

I don’t know who Jill Filopovic is, but I doubt that I would like her.

There is a sort of tournament among feminists, in which they compete for prizes by striving to excel their rivals in the denunciation of misogynist scapegoats. And because feminism is a phenomenon of the Left, it’s preferable if the scapegoats can be somehow linked to the Right.

As with all leftist ideologies, feminism is collectivist in nature. Rape is therefore not a crime perpetrated by specific criminals against specific victims. Rather, rape is men’s collective crime, of which women are the collective victims: All men are therefore complicit in every rape, and all women suffer when any woman is raped.

Read it.

Tammy Church and Eric Dunlap of St. Louis filed separate suits Monday in St. Louis Circuit Court. Their son, Jeremy Dunlap, 21, was stabbed at the center by another homeless man Feb. 12, 2008. That man, Robert Gamble, was  convicted of murder and is serving a 30-year prison sentence.

Uh-huh. Where were they when their son needed help? But they’re quick enough to sue the people who were doing the job the parents ought to have been doing.