Read it.

A faltering economy explains much of the job shortage in America, but advancing technology has sharply magnified the effect, more so than is generally understood, according to two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The automation of more and more work once done by humans is the central theme of “Race Against the Machine,” an e-book to be published on Monday.

“Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine,” the authors write.

Read it.

Millions of women obtain abortions because they do not want baby girls.

It’s shocking, but incontrovertible. Two decades ago, Harvard economist Amartya Sen, in an arrestingly titled article, documented the statistical reality that “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing.” In a recently published book, Unnatural Selection, journalist Mara Hvistendahl convincingly demonstrates that the overwhelming reason for the increasingly large demographic disparity in the male-female birth ratio is sex-selection abortion. Hvistendahl estimates the number of missing or dead now to be 160 million and counting. Women have abortions because (among other reasons) they are able to learn the sex of their unborn baby and kill her if she’s a girl.

Jeff Jarvis is always worth reading.

I wrote a book about sharing. But a book is a bad form for sharing.

Read it.

I TYPED these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook — invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker.

Read it.

Treasure hunters claim they have discovered two ships from Sir Francis Drake’s fleet off the coast of Panama and believe his coffin could lie on the seabed nearby.

Aaaaarrrrr….

Thomas understands the dialectic.

Government has essentially one legitimate function, which is to protect citizens from predators, foreign and domestic. That covers national defense and domestic justice (including the enforcement of contracts and prosecution of fraud). Those functions could be provided by private agencies, but — because of the danger of warlordism — they are best provided by government and funded from a true flat tax.

A very elegant statement of the position of the righteous.

A proper division of labor would place defense in the hands of the national government and justice in the hands of State and local governments. This would eliminate the ability of the national government to criminalize conduct for the sake of imposing its will on everyone. For the same reason, the provision of justice should be devolved to the lowest possible level within each State.

Some very good ideas here. Read the whole thing.

Read it.

A grenade thrown into on a bar in the Kenyan capital Nairobi has wounded 14 people, all Kenyans, in an attack police linked to recent threats made by Somali Al-Shebab insurgents.

“We are linking the grenade attack to the threats that have been issued by Shebab, and that is why I am appealing to city residents to be vigilant and cooperate with our officers,” said Nairobi police chief Antony Kibuchi.

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

Scott Johnson at Powerline likes to point and laugh.

In his statement marking the death of Muhammar Gaddafi last week, President Obama inserted a mystifying passage: “[T]he Libyan people now have a great responsibility — to build an inclusive and tolerant and democratic Libya that stands as the ultimate rebuke to Qaddafi’s dictatorship….”

“An inclusive and tolerant and democratic Libya.” Can we mull that over with a glass of wine at the faculty club?

Obama is the poster child for Leftists Out of Touch With Reality.

No sooner had Obama read his statement than Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, the chairman of the National Transitional Council and de facto president, announced that Libyan laws would have Sharia as their “basic source.” Just to get the ball rolling, he immediately lifted one law from Gaddafi’s era that he said was in conflict with Sharia — the law banning polygamy. Happy days are here again.

Yeah, there’s that Hope and Change stuff in action.

Read it.

Yeah, good luck with that.

Read it.

Another layer to the depth of the Sebelius abortion corruption has been revealed with today’s AP report that Kansas health department (KDHE) in 2005 destroyed the state late-term abortion reports at the heart of the felony charges against Planned Parenthood.

The pre-trial hearing for felony “false-writing” charges had been scheduled for Monday Oct. 24, Since the original reports have now been discovered as destroyed, the Johnson County District attorney’s office had asked for a delay so they could engage other witnesses to verify the authenticity of copies of the state reports.

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

KFL Executive Director, Mary Kay Culp, said, “Only guilty people destroy evidence; not even we anticipated Sebelius and her administration could stoop this low to protect abortion industry criminality, but this proves they did. Sebelius wanted to insure that evidence of illegal abortions was removed before Kline could use it to convict her abortion industry campaign supporters. We truly can’t find words to adequately convey how outrageous this is. We are especially incredulous given that Sebelius’ Health department testified about these reports in Johnson County court in 2008 without once mentioning that the reports had been destroyed!  It’s all so unbelievable, and yet, given the players, so very believable indeed!”

What’s wrong with Kansas? Well, they have a bad habit of electing Democrats, for one thing….

Read it.

Voters around the country are concluding it’s better to be red than dead—applying a whole meaning to an old phrase.  If you do not currently live in a red state, there’s a good chance you will be in the near future.  Either you will flee to a red state or a red state will come to you—because voters fed up with blue-state fiscal irresponsibility will elect candidates who promise to pass red-state policies.

Read it.

Read it.

From Nazis and film buffs to heckling and humble pie, the obscure origins of commonly-used words and phrases are explained in a new etymological guide.

Read it.

“Passing the Regents don’t mean nothing,” Ms. Thomas said. “The main focus in high school is to get you to graduate; it makes the school look good. They get you in and get you out.”

I’m convinced that one of the reasons that so many job openings these days specify a college degree, even for positions for which such a requirement seems silly, is because that’s one way employers can be sure of getting people with at least what used to be considered a high-school education.

Read it.

MONTREAL — Young and striking in her black hijab, Mouna Diab was once active in a Quebec youth group that fought discrimination against Muslims by challenging the stereotypes that too often associate them with violence and terror.

But the outspoken 26-year-old activist had little to say this week after appearing in a Montreal courtroom to face a charge alleging she had violated a United Nations Security Council arms embargo that prohibits the export of weapons to Lebanon.

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

On the other hand, these are not parts for ‘assault rifles’, which are fully automatic weapons; these are for semi-automatic rifles, which are civilian sporting arms rather than military. Of course, there isn’t a lot of sport shooting going on in Lebanon, unless you include in your definition The Most Dangerous Game, so I’m sure her intent was far from innocent – these parts will work perfectly well with an M-16 receiver, which is the important part.

This whole affair has a number of puzzling parts. But it certainly illustrates that ‘journalists’ these days can’t be bothered to get the facts straight.

Read it.

We live in the age where we make a living by doing things more efficiently than others. We blame other countries like China for taking our jobs but we are all doing it ourselves. When you learn how to use computer programs like Excel, Word, and Photoshop, you are eliminating other people’s jobs. What used to require a team of people to produce, you now can do it all by yourself using these programs. In other words, you are profiting from the loss of other people’s jobs. That’s how we survive in today’s world. We struggle every day to avoid being the one whose job is eliminated by the efficiency of someone else.

The key is to focus on jobs that machines can’t do. Journalists are in trouble; plumbers aren’t.

Read it.

But that formulation can be interpreted in many ways – it was also the basis of Egypt’s largely secular constitution under President Hosni Mubarak, and remains so after his fall.

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

‘Expected’ by whom? The Crust, maybe — those of us who appreciate the essence of Islam viewed it as inevitable. Every Muslim is committed BY THE NATURE OF HIS RELIGION to work for the implementation of shari’ah law. The only places where they don’t do this is where Muslims are so few on the ground that it would be a waste of time. As Britain and France and Sweden and the Netherlands and Michigan and Wisconsin are finding out, it doesn’t take a huge percentage of Muslims in the population to trigger pro-shari’ah efforts. The only country with a Muslim majority that doesn’t implement shari’ah law is Turkey, and it is rapidly heading in that direction — a ‘secular’ state with a Muslim-majority population is an unstable situation that can be held that way only through tight authoritarian oppression, and ALWAYS eventually unravels.

Read it.

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

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

David Bernstein boils it down into a single pithy paragraph.

At some point, however, a contradiction became apparent: if I didn’t trust the government to competently run, say, public schools, what made me think that the the government, subject to the same public-choicey and other constraints, would be competent at handling the much more complex task of remaking other societies in America’s image?

And that’s the question that faces us all. Every time a statist pushes for another government program, the question needs to be: What if this is run like the Post Office? ‘Cause it’s gonna be; history is quite clear on that.

Read it.

And of course it will soon be banned as ‘discriminatory’.

Read it.

Watchmaker Hublot has recreated the mechanism using modern techniques and shrunk it down to nearly postage-stamp size. The new watch – a one of a kind – features the full mechanism as historians and scientists understand it along with a standard three-hand tourbillon as well as a date register.

Available soon from Mattel, if they can persuade the Consumer Protection Agency that it’s safe for kids.

Read it.

The system, called PaperSpeckle, is based on the microscopic patterns of light and shadow that appear when light shines on paper. Subramanian and his colleagues encoded these patterns with an equation known as a Gabor transform, which is also used in iris and fingerprint recognition. This creates a unique “fingerprint” that allows the software to distinguish between 10³⁰ different sheets of paper.

The software runs on an Android smartphone, ownership of which is on the rise in India, connected to a USB microscope. The components can be bought for around $100 each, making it accessible to small organisations and some individuals.

As well as analysing the unique speckle pattern, the software can generate a QR code – a type of matrix barcode – that corresponds to it. If this is on the document, users can authenticate it even if they do not have access to an online database. While someone could easily copy the QR code to another sheet of paper, the speckles would no longer match.

As soon as governments use it for currency, banks will be on this like politicians on tax money.

Read it.

A few weeks ago, Mitt Romney observed that corporations are people. This prompted hysteria on the left, including a video produced by the Democratic Party. But of course Romney was right. A corporation consists of its owners, i.e. shareholders, and its employees–people. It is an elementary principle of law that a corporation can act only through its employees and agents–people. The Democrats’ apparent belief that you can hurt companies without hurting people is absurd. The corporation is merely a legal form in which people do business, now several hundred years old. It is absolutely necessary for any major commercial enterprise because its existence can continue without disruption beyond any one individual’s lifespan. So being “anti-corporation” is equivalent to being pro-medieval.

And once again, ‘progressives’ are shown to be the true reactionaries.

Read it.

I knew about the churches but didn’t think about the satellite dishes.

Urban Boy Scouts, take note.

Read it. And watch the video.

It take exception to Ms. Raza’s assertion that the mandate to abuse women is not in the Koran; it most emphatically is in the Koran. I quote from the most authoritative source on Sunni Islamic law, Reliance of the Traveller, Book P, “Enormities”:

p42.0 A WIFE’S REBELLING AGAINST HER HUSBAND (def: m10.12)

p42.1 Allah Most High says:

“Men are the guardians of women, since Allah has been more generous to one than the other, and because of what they (men) spend from their wealth. so righteous women will be obedient, and in absence watchful, for Allah is watchful. And if you fear their intractability, warn them, send them from bed, or hit them. But if they obey you, seek no way to blame them” (Koran 4:34).

p42.2 The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said:

(1)		“Allah will not look at a woman who is ungrateful to her husband, while unable to do without him.”
(2)		“When a man calls his wife to his bed and she will not come, and he spends the night angry with her, the angels, curse her until morning.”
(3)		“It is not lawful for a woman to fast when her husband is present, save by his leave. Nor to permit anyone into his house except with his permission.”
(4)		“Whoever leaves her husband’s house (A: without his permission), the angels curse her until she returns or repents.” (Khalil Nahlawi:) It is a condition for the permissibility of her going out (dis: m 10.3-4) that she take no measures to enhance her beauty, and that her figure is concealed or altered to a form unlikely to draw looks from men or attract them., Allah Most High says,“Remain in your homes and do not display your beauty as women did in the pre-Islamic period of ignorance” (Koran 33.33)

As you can see, Islamic law — mainstream Islamic law, as accepted by devout Muslims all over the world — not only permits the subjugation of women, it requires it.

Read it.

Before colonization, the native American population (who actually traveled the farthest from Africa) were the least diverse genetically, the most “clonal” continental group. Their low diversity, especially in immune genes, partly explains why the natives fell so rapidly to smallpox and other introduced diseases. Interestingly, some addressed the problem as Butler’s species did: They kidnapped “outsiders.”

And that’s what got them where they are today. Oh, wait….

Read it.

Unless we’re talking about Joe Biden, of course. And maybe AlGore.

Read it.

Now we learn that an important witness, illegal alien Luis Acosta, in the dragging death of young Matthew Denice (pictured) in Milford, Massachusetts, cut off a tracking bracelet and may have escaped to Ecuador. Acosta was a passenger in the truck driven by Nicolas Guaman when he dragged Denice for a quarter mile, killing him.

Milford Police Chief Tom O’Loughlin said he was “beside himself” with anger at the ineptitude of ICE officials and their statement that the loss of Acosta was his problem, not theirs.

Freeberg is always worth reading.

Blogger friend Irish Cicero had an encounter with one of the persons I think of as “The Hooked”: A waitress, probably angling for a larger tip, commiserating with him by means of such twaddle as “We of the 99.” The bait is gone, the hook has set, she’s not yet fully reeled in but the line is taut. These aren’t individuals anymore for they have willingly given up their individual identity even though they don’t know it. This is a monolith; it’s a blob. It’s everywhere, it’s annoying, it’s maddening, it has all the characteristics of a zombie infestation and it looks unbeatable. Even worse, the closer you study it the more you despair. If these people gave a rat’s rear end about jobs-jobs-jobs, or conservative-versus-liberal, one might nurture some hope about cluing them in. But since they go through life feeling their way around problems rather than thinking their way through them, you might as well argue with a hamster. They are beyond reason, and any one among them is ready, willing and able to fully cancel out your vote. What’s the use of even trying.

And what’s even better is, he appreciates the nature of the Crust, and what must be done.

Your nice old Auntie and your airhead 99-percenter waitress, are motivated by entirely different things. They don’t like seeing people hurt. They’ve blossomed this into a hatred, for no reason more complicated than that hatred is easy. It comes naturally, it comes quick, and once visibly displayed it helps to establish your allegiances. Michael Corleone said “Never hate your enemies, it clouds your judgment,” and this is true. Their judgment is clouded. See, the whole problem is they know more about who they want to have as friends, than about who they want to have as enemies; they don’t really know where to direct the anger.

Read it.

The minivan driver who knocked Wang down, and then ran over her deliberately, has since surrendered to the police, but offered a curious explanation for his action. He said he had been talking on his mobile phone when he hit the girl, but decided to run her over because it would have cost him less to pay off a dead girl’s parents than to pay for her hospital expenses.

“If she had died, I would have been required to pay only about 20,000 yuan (about Rs 1.5 lakh) in compensation, but if she were injured, it would cost me hundreds of thousands of yuan in hospital expenses,” he said.

My question is, did it ever have a soul to begin with.

Read it.

A look at the Boy Scout’s Handbook.

The Boy Scouts of America celebrated their hundredth anniversary last year, and this year is the centennial of The Handbook for Boys, their first official manual. Comparing it with the current edition of the handbook—the 12th, published in 2009—shows that the small outpost of civilization manned by the Scouts holds on bravely in America. But decades of aggressive political correctness have had their effect, and the Scouts have lost some of the confident American boyishness that loves heroes and makes for heroes. This is too bad for the more than 3 million boys enrolled in the Scouts today, and for the society in which they will grow up to become men.

The Boy Scouts of America have endured their share of criticism over the years, to be sure. Before the First World War, they were accused of being militaristic. More recently, they have been attacked for excluding girls, for insisting that belief in God (any god) is a requirement of citizenship, and especially for being anti-homosexual. This last indictment has taken the BSA all the way to the Supreme Court; in Boy Scouts v. Dale (2000), the Court upheld the right of the organization, as a voluntary association, to refuse to hire homosexual scoutmasters. Criticism on this theme has continued since the ruling, and seems to have gotten even nastier in the ensuing decade. The Boy Scouts today bear the scars of these attacks, and their latest handbook reveals that they have succumbed in some ways to these relentless demands for political correctness.

I have a copy of the re-issue of the 1908 Boy Scout Manual, and it is a delight to read.

The new handbook retains the traditional focus on the outdoors, with much of the same information on how to camp, hike, fish, sail, and fend for oneself in the wilderness. But its discussions of these things have been pared down and lack the verve, punch, and adventurous spirit—the manliness—of the original handbook. Whereas the first edition imparts tough-minded common sense, the 12th edition brims with cautionary tales and safety checklists, emphasizing timidity rather than adventure. The front cover contains a pull-out manual for parents on How to Protect your Children from Child Abuse. It’s as if the first thought our boys should have is that they are potential victims.

I wouldn’t waste money on the current edition.

Read it.

And none of them mention the books that leftists in the Crust get rid of because they’re Politically Incorrect, like Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus. And God help you if you want to watch Disney’s Song of the South.

Read it.

Most of the discussion on income inequality focuses on the relative differences over time between low-income and high-income American households, but it’s also instructive to analyze the demographic differences among income groups at a given point in time to answer the question: How are high-income households different from low-income households?

Katherine Mangu-Ward does a little fisking of the zeitgeist.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s decision to stay out of the Republican presidential race means that the American people will be spared months of discussion about his ample waistline and the bad example it sets. Nonetheless, with first lady Michelle Obama urging everyone to get moving, obesity remains a political hot potato, or maybe a tater tot. Below, a helping of skepticism about the causes of Americans’ poor eating habits—and the effectiveness of political fixes.

It is entirely possible that there are people out there who know better than you do what you ought to be eating. I suggest, however, that none of them are elected officials.

Freedman gives us another new word.

‘A system of government where the least capable are elected by the least capable of producing and where the members of society least capable of sustaining themselves or succeed are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.’

No, he didn’t invent it, but if it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t know about it. So to him be the glory.

Unlike what you might call a “left-wing-tocracy,” an ineptocracy is to be criticized not quite so much for being lefty, as for putting all persons & classes in roles that are polar-opposite from where they belong. The mediocre are examples of excellence, the undecided & apathetic are examples of great leadership, children are examples of wisdom and the indigent are examples of desirable, productive living. But left-wing-ocracies mutate into ineptocracies, or vice-versa, so they could be regarded as synonymous. Of all American cities that are home to five million people or more, perhaps 4 out of 5 could be fairly characterized as both. Ineptocracies are governed by left-wing pukes. Left-wing pukes create ineptocracies.

Read the whole thing.

Read it.

Read it.

The fuss over Siri’s sex also raises a larger question: From voice-mail systems to GPS devices to Siri and beyond, why are so many computerized voices female?

One answer may lie in biology. Scientific studies have shown that people generally find women’s voices more pleasing than men’s.

“It’s much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes,” said Stanford University Professor Clifford Nass, author of “The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships.” “It’s a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices.”

Read it.

A Black high school football team (Hancock County) attacks the opposing teams head coach (Dave Daniels) in Georgia after he coaches his team to victory. Daniels is white; his attackers were all-Black.

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

Steve Sailer has some fun laughing at the New York Times.

Almost every harvest season, we read stories in the New York Times about how some crop somewhere is rotting in the fields which proves that civilization will grind to a halt unless we import lots more illegal immigrant stoop laborers stat. Could it be, however, that NYT staffers are not quite as sophisticated in their understanding of farm labor economics as they think they are after spending a half hour on the phone with noted agriculture expert Tamar Jacoby?

Timothy Egan is one of the more entertaining columnists from the Times — his blurb says ‘Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.’ Of course, in this context ‘the West’ apparently means the Upper West Side of Noo Yawk, since Mr Egan’s attitudes are conventional ones characteristic of somebody who has only crossed the Hudson River when he was paid to do so.

Read it.

Thinfilm, a Norwegian developer of printable memory, has co-announced with California’s Xerox PARC a development that takes a big step towards the day when every manufactured object will report in to the internet.

Thinfilm and PARC’s breakthrough is a technology that can print not only memory onto, well, thin films, but can now also print transistors to address and manage that memory.

Read it.

Designed by Stefano Boeri – architect, academic and former editor of design and architecture magazine Domus – his Bosco Verticale is a towering 27-story structure, currently under construction in Milan, Italy. Once complete, the tower will be home to the world’s first vertical forest.

Read it.

Now, perhaps you’re like me and any time you hear someone say something that so clearly dismisses anyone else’s well-being aside from their own, your brain shuts down your ears for fear that your entire faith in the basic providence of humanity would be vanquished in an angry mind-fire. So let me break this down for you. Samuels, President of a union of teachers, is saying that they’ll block online courses regardless of any evidence as to their efficacy if it results in even oneless lecturer on campus. Learning? Rising costs in education for students? Technological progress? Unimportant, fools! This is where I think back to the union leaders of old, who pushed for social reforms effecting those outside their union members, and wonder where it all went wrong.

Megan McArdle calls for a little adult supervision of Congress.

I moderated a panel on infrastructure and jobs at the Bipartisan Policy Center this morning, and one of the topics that came up was an infrastructure bank.  Asked about it, one of the panelists said “what I’d like is to make all the members of Congress write a 100 word essay on what an infrastructure bank is.”  It was a good line, and the audience laughed because it hints at something all too true when it comes to discussing policy: there are a lot of ferocious advocates of policies they can’t explain.

Read it.

An independent British medical watchdog says the first treatment proven to help people with the deadliest form of skin cancer is too expensive to be used by the U.K.’s health care system, a recommendation critics called a potential death sentence.

Don’t you just love that government-provided health care? Don’t you just wish we had a system just like that?

Well, then, vote for the Magic Negro and he’ll do his best to … well, probably just ignore you — but he’ll certainly talk a good fight.

Read it.

The pigs want to be fed.

Read it.

Read it. And watch the video.

Either pretty funny or pretty sad. Or perhaps both.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Attorney Martin White says he and Haley Cobb’s family have patiently waited for 11 months for the $9.7 million they’re owed from winning a medical malpractice case the largest jury award in Trumbull County’s history.

That’s a bunch.

Pretty white.

And so far, according to the survey, Occupy Wall Street would qualify as stuff white people like. The sample of non-white people, according to Schultz, is too small to even analyze. One thing he noticed, however, is that some people identify with nationality, rather than race–another item to keep in mind for target marketing. And in the vein, the organizers have been discussing doing a “non-white media day,” in which everyone who speaks to the media is of another ethnic background. They have also discussed doing an over-40 day.

Gotta have them tokens — anything to keep people from knowing the truth.