Read it.

A new survey from the Pew Internet Center confirms every suspicion I harbor about people my age: Despite unprecedented access to information, technology, wealth, and food, we are basically retarded.

Can’t disagree.

Mike Masnick sounds the alarm.

The federal government has been paying lip service to the idea that it wants to encourage new businesses and startups in the US. And this is truly important to the economy, as studies have shown that almost all of the net job growth in this country is coming from internet startups. Thankfully some politicians recognize this, but the federal government seems to be going in the other direction. With the JotForm situation unfolding, where the US government shut down an entire website with no notice or explanation, people are beginning to recognize that the US is not safe for internet startups.

Read it.

Obama’s on it. It’ll be in the next budget, powered by wind and solar.

Read it.

The effect happens when two sounds clash, and results in some people hearing a louder noise and some a softer noise, depending on where they stand in relation to the source.

People taking part in a ritual dance around a pair of pipers would have heard the music unexpectedly grow quieter as they moved past certain spots due to this natural phenomenon, Mr Waller said.

Read it.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

Read it.

It always surprises people when the Chinese Communists act like Communists.

Read it. And watch the video.

On Tuesday, Jeff Sessions, ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, asked acting OMB Director Jeffrey Zients a simple question: Does President Obama’s FY 2013 budget–the matter on which Mr. Zients had come to the Senate to testify–increase spending compared with current law (most recently, the debt ceiling compromise that was reached last summer). For some reason, Zients was utterly stumped. He was never able to come up with a coherent answer, let alone a straight one.

Today it happened again. Tim Geithner took his turn at the Budget Committee, and Sessions asked him the same thing. Geithner, like Zients, was confounded. The concepts of “more” and “less” seemed to be too much for him.

It is hard to know what to make of this arithmetic ineptitude on the part of the Obama administration. Is it possible that they don’t know the answer? No. The only explanation is that they know the answer, but prefer that the American people don’t find it out.

Read it.

They said, ‘It’s a plot to bomb the President.’ and the guys in the field got it garbled. It’s so hard to get good help these days….

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that there were National Bagging Championships. (For some of you: I’ll bet you didn’t know that in certain backwaters of Flyover Country there are still kids that bag your groceries.)

The bagging issue might be familiar to Strib readers; a story this week noted that Target is pushing plastic over paper, and some people don’t like it. Agreed: Plastic makes you feel cheap, somehow. Soviet. I am carryink goods from People’s State Sustenance Node No. 23 in glorious People’s Sack.

When done with them, some people also feel guilty throwing them away. So they get shoved into the Plastic Bag Full of Smaller Plastic Bags, which eventually becomes the size of a beanbag chair; then you take it to the store and put it in the Really Big Plastic Bag for Holding Smaller Plastic Bags Filled with Even Smaller Plastic Bags, and this absolves you of all sin and guilt.

We’d like to think they’re compressed into incredibly dense cubes and used as building materials in poor countries, but for all we know they take them out behind the store, douse them with gasoline and torch them.

Of course, the truly enviro-conscious have reusable totes, even if they do accumulate so much grot and bacteria they’re like a Shake ‘n’ Bake bag for salmonella.

Read it.

I think you would have to be coming from a very unusual place to think that legislation that did this was a good idea.  Why would you ever think that some small committee meeting in secret in DC should decide for the entire country and the entire medical profession and all insurance companies what medical screening tests should or should not be covered by insurance?

Being a government employee helps.

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Hey look, here’s a big omnibus article by David Pimentel of the Florida Costal School of Law on all the ways you are potentially legally screwed if you let your kid do stuff that was considered normal at some point in the less intensively parented past.

No wonder people aren’t having kids any more. They don’t dare.

Read it.

UNESCO, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, is hosting a conference about The Media World after Wikileaks and News of the World. Sounds like it could be an interesting event, but one organization not happy about it… is Wikileaks. Seeing as it was a conference that touched on Wikileaks’ interests directly, Wikileaks asked to take part, and was instead denied a chance to speak at the event. When asked about this, UNESCO actually claimed that choosing to not allow Wikileaks attendees was an exercise in “freedom of expression,” which seems like a poor choice of words.

Reminds me of the ‘Machine That Goes Ping!’ sketch in Monty Python’s LIFE OF BRIAN.

Pregnant woman: ‘What should I be doing?’
Doctor: ‘Nothing, my dear. You’re not qualified.’

Walter Olson points out that most of the jobs government creates are pure waste.

Not long ago I took note in this space of how some people conceive of government regulation as a way to create jobs among lawyers, fillers-out of paperwork forms, installers of state-mandated equipment, and so forth. In case you thought I was exaggerating, here’s a new Business Week article arguing in all earnestness that “Regulations Create Jobs, Too.” Given the wounded state of the U.S. economy since the 2008 crash, it laments, “government rules have become politically toxic.” But never fear: “The Obama Administration, girding for election-year attacks on its record, is trying to highlight the upside of government rules.”

Read it.

Remember this next time the NIMBY eco-nazis start freaking out.

Read it. And watch the video.

Most American readers will remember a brutal incident in Texas back in 1998, when a man named James Byrd was chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to death.

Because the victim was black and his murderers were white, there was a national outcry about the crime that continued for years afterwards. During the 2000 election campaign the incident was even used for shamelessly partisan purposes — by the Democrats, needless to say.

When the races are reversed, however, silence reigns. When a white farmer was chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to death by murderous blacks, there was no great outcry. Outside of his immediate neighborhood in South Africa, hardly anyone was even aware of the crime.

He’s just another statistic. He’s one of thousands of white victims of ethnic cleansing in South Africa.

The process has become so blatant that the leader of the youth wing of the African National Congress implicitly acknowledged that the current regime exercises a measure of political control over it.

“All whites are criminals,” he said. “We will take the land back. Without compensation.”

But that’s not evidence of racism, since it was uttered by a black man. By definition, non-whites cannot possibly be racist.

My guess is that what he was saying can be excused as “redistributive justice against the historical oppressor”. Or some similar Marxist cant.

Read it.

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

Read it. And watch the video.

This is what Democrats want to turn America into. And they just might succeed, if one can use so fair a word for so foul a thing.

Read it.

In absolute terms, I’m not worried about being persecuted by child welfare services.  But power-mad bureaucrats probably outnumber kidnappers and serial killers at least a thousand to one.

I’m convinced that one of the reasons that people in the First World have quit having children is because of the tremendous legal liability it opens you up to. Who wants all that hassle? Get a dog. They’ll love you a lot longer.

Read it.

The pattern of behavior from the US Department of State (DOS) is to shut down adoption programs from countries that do not participate in the Hague Convention for Inter-Country Adoption. Superficially, the DOS appears to believe that rate of unethical adoptions out of countries that do not participate in the Hague Convention is too high, and therefore moves to shut down all adoptions out of those countries.

Apparently the fact that most orphans in the world reside in non-Hague countries is lost on the DOS.

Under US law, the DOS is required to accept and review adoptions originating from all countries. Further, they have yet to provide evidence that the rate of unethical adoptions out of non-Hague countries is higher than 1%, much less “too” high. Instead, they throw around headline grabbing terms like “child trafficking” and “fraud”, which gives them the political cover to advance their agenda.

Nowhere in this debate do we hear from the State Department is a discussion of what happens to the children who are left behind, who are not adopted because the DOS has blocked all adoptions from that country.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, speaks for all right-thinking people. Well, me, anyway.

Call me naïve, but the left’s coarse brutishness still shocks me. The only thing that shocks me more is the right’s suicidal cowardice.

You can read the rest of the article, but you don’t really need to. This says it all, all that really needs to be said about modern life.

Read it.

Last spring I wrote about Nature Publishing Group’s plan for a $49 electronic textbook packed with interactivity and unlimited content updates for life. The original publication date was scheduled for September 1, 2011, but for a variety of reasons the release was pushed back. Today marks the official launch of “Principles of Biology”.

The future is here, it just isn’t evenly distributed. Yet.

George Will points out the chickens coming home to roost. Watch the video.

You asked the question, ‘How did this come about?’ George, this is what liberalism looks like. This is what the progressive state does. It tries to break all the institutions of civil society, all the institutions that mediate between the individual and the state. They have to break them to the saddle of the state.

Sometimes I think that George Will is the only adult on TV today.

Read it.

Sounds like a tabloid headline, doesn’t it? ‘Giant walking catfish attacks sleeping child.’ ‘Tiny space aliens attend rock concert.’ ‘Hitler has son with  French teen.’

Read it.

If they had died blowing up an Israeli pizza parlor or kid’s birthday party, on the other hand, they’d be having a parade.

Check it out.

In case of emergency, break glass. Order will be restored, communism suppressed, and the country will avoid being dragged into any major wars. Citizens will live in prosperity until the politicians are allowed to take charge again, at which point the leftist idiots will take over and the economy will tank.

Read it. And watch the video.

A mosque in DeKalb County, Georgia has not only annoyed its neighbors with noise and vehicle congestion, it has also been cited for numerous building code violations, yet continues to operate. The mosque’s leaders have ignored court orders to remove structures added without building permits, and other illegal modifications to the property.

Today is the latest deadline for compliance with the court order. It will be interesting to see how the judge handles the flouting of her previous rulings, and whether the mosque will play the “Islamophobia” card in response.

Just plain ordinary folks like the rest of us.

Read it.

But you knew that.

Read it.

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

Read it.

The 2005 Kashmir earthquake was used as cover by the US to send secret agents into Pakistan tasked with tracking down al-Qaeda operatives and their Pakistani handlers, according to a new book that lifts the lid on the Pentagon’s special operations.

Well, thank God. That demonstrates more intelligence than I’ve seen our ‘intelligence’ agencies demonstrate in my lifetime.

Read it.

The reports I allude to, contended that many went on disability.  In fact, they projected that nearly 25% of those not actively seeking a job had applied for, and been accepted, by disability – mostly Social Security.

And why not? ‘It’s free! It’s free! Just swipe your EBT!’

he cost to the federal budget of these programs has escalated along with the number of claimants, and now runs around $200 billion per year—more than the budgets of the Departments of Commerce, Energy, Homeland Security, Interior, Justice, and State combined.

Thus a quarter of people who drop out of the workforce and come off the unemployment benefits, simply move to receiving disability payments. And most stay there until they roll into the social security program when they retire – from their disability. The same source, a different program.

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

Steven Hayward at Powerline doesn’t know where to start.

First, out of California—good news!  Fewer solar projects in California will fail in the future!  This is chiefly because the state is simply mandating that utilities buy their power, no matter what it costs.  Pretty easy for your business model to work when you have tax credits and the government mandating that people buy your product.  Where can I signup for this deal?  (Oh yea, the White House.   I forgot.)  Try this headline out as a thought experiment: “Fewer Oil Wells Will Lose Money.”  Doesn’t seem too likely, does it?

Read it.

Overall, the Post found that $3.9 billion in federal grants and financing flowed to 21 companies backed by firms with connections to five Obama administration staffers and advisers.

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

‘And I say to you: Make unto you friends of the mammon of iniquity; that when you shall fail, they may receive you into everlasting dwellings.’

Read it.

Not while there are Democrats willing to use it as an election issue.

For now, shortfalls in expected revenues for Social Security are being made up through general fund revenues. But over the course of the expected 10-month extension, that will add $100 billion to the federal deficit.

“There’s a concern that, even though the Social Security trust funds are being held harmless for the time being, that might be difficult to do over the longer run,” says Paul Van de Water, a senior fellow at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and another former Social Security Administration official.

Oh, ya think?

They’ve actually picked the only ‘tax cut’ that will exacerbate the looming bankruptcy of the Social Security and Medicare systems … coincidence? I think not.

Watch it.

We could do worse … and have.

Read it.

Almost half of our GDP is eaten up by layers of government, only a couple of percentage points below Europe.

Read it.

For decades, sugar beet and sugar cane farmers and processors have been the beneficiaries of a sugar program that stealthily drives up sugar costs—and, consequently, the cost of that heart-shaped box of chocolates. Over the past 30 years, the annual burden on U.S. consumers has averaged over $3 billion in higher food prices.

The “no-romance” sugar program has largely been ignored by legislators and groups concerned with tax burdens because there are no direct federal subsidies for the sugar industry. Instead, U.S. sugar policy raises prices indirectly by taxing consumers through the marketplace. A system of import quotas and domestic supply controls works to raise sugar prices for households and food processors to a target level of 23.3 cents per pound of raw sugar when world prices fall below that amount. This system drives up consumer food prices and destroys jobs in the food processing sector because of reduced competitiveness in the global marketplace.

Over the 30-year period from 1980 through 2009, the sugar program effectively doubled the price U.S. consumers paid for sugar and increased annual food costs by about $9 per person. That may not sound like a big price tag, but it resulted in a $1.3 billion deadweight loss for the U.S. economy (think of all the extra money that could’ve been spent on red roses and high-end confectionary!). And how did the sugar farmers, who are fewer than 20,000 in number and relatively wealthy, fare? They received a $1.7 billion net gain.

Read it.

Ali Dizaei, the Scotland Yard commander once branded a “criminal in uniform”, was returned to jail yesterday after being found guilty of corruption for a second time.

Dizaei attacked Waad al-Baghdadi in a row over a £600 debt in 2008, before inflicting injuries on himself and arresting the man in an attempt to frame him.

Yeah, that’s a really British name, Ali Dizael.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in Michigan; they’re all crooks up there anyway.

Read it.

The surface evidence is clear – I created a new foursquare account on my iPhone and it immediately told me that 402 of my contacts were on Foursquare and suggested I connect with them.

There are theoretical (but highly unlikely) ways Foursquare could connect me with them without uploading my contacts, but it’s highly unlikely. So a developer I know went to the trouble to proxy the iPhone through Charles Proxy to sniff the traffic. It showed a substantial amount of data being uploaded to Foursquare from the phone immediately before the screen above was shown with contact information. We perused that data, and it included email addresses and phone numbers for everyone in the phone contacts.The surface evidence is clear – I created a new foursquare account on my iPhone and it immediately told me that 402 of my contacts were on Foursquare and suggested I connect with them.

There are theoretical (but highly unlikely) ways Foursquare could connect me with them without uploading my contacts, but it’s highly unlikely. So a developer I know went to the trouble to proxy the iPhone through Charles Proxy to sniff the traffic. It showed a substantial amount of data being uploaded to Foursquare from the phone immediately before the screen above was shown with contact information. We perused that data, and it included email addresses and phone numbers for everyone in the phone contacts.

 

Tim Cavanaugh has the inside story.

Tax cheat Tim Geithner, the only member of the Obama economic brain trust who has not yet been fired, testified to the Senate Finance Committee today in favor of the president’s proposed trillion-dollar-deficit budget.

Geithner, a Dartmouth man esteemed more for his tennis skills than for his understanding of markets or business, peddled much Keynesian voodoo before a nation whose economy he helped destroy while employed by the Federal Reserve Bank and then the Department of the Treasury.

Read it.

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

Read it.

I once had to get a special dispensation to work at a newspaper because my degree was not in journalism but, rather, in economics. Have you ever been in a newsroom with a bunch of journalism grads who don’t know how to calculate anything meaningful about, say, the most recently released budget document because, well, their degrees are in journalism? I have. It’s not pretty. If you think some reporters have trouble getting religion, let me assure you that many reporters also have trouble getting statistics.

Read it.

Megan McArdle asks how the physical university will survive the coming disintermediation of higher education.  I don’t think the answer is superior learning or even superior credentials.  It’s assortative mating.  Assortative mating works best when the cognitive elites are able to combine signaling behaviors for their superior genes, particularly for doing economics, with the physical proximity that supplies bonding behaviors and oxytocin and also the opportunity to sniff the pheromes.  We need classrooms for one kind of fitness signaling and dorms rooms for another.  There will be math involved.  Not because it’s necessarily needed, but because when economists compete for the opportunity to mate, math supplies the antlers.

Walter Olson totes up the many ways in which politicians are total whores.

Wally is a friend of mine, two years ahead of me at Yale, and has never wavered from his appreciation of the incongruities of American political life.

Read it.

Fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami activists vandalised several Hindu temples in the Hathazari area of Chittagong in Bangladesh on Thursday and Friday, forcing the law enforcement authorities to impose Section 144 of the Bangladesh Penal Code that bans public gatherings in the affected area.

Another pointed reminder that freedom of religion is not a Muslim value.

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

Read it.

“In ‘08 it became pretty apparent MSNBC was going left,” says one source. “They were using our research to write their stories. They were eager to use our stuff.” Media Matters staff had the direct line of MSNBC president Phil Griffin, and used it. Griffin took their calls.

Stories about Fox News were especially well received by MSNBC anchors and executives: “If we published something about Fox in the morning, they’d have it on the air that night verbatim.”

But MSNBC executives weren’t the only ones talking regularly to Media Matters.

“The entire progressive blogosphere picked up our stuff,” says a Media Matters source, “from Daily Kos to Salon. Greg Sargent [of the Washington Post] will write anything you give him. He was the go-to guy to leak stuff.”

“If you can’t get it anywhere else, Greg Sargent’s always game,” agreed another source with firsthand knowledge.

Exciting things happen!

Have you heard about the plight of Hamza Kashgari? He’s a young Saudi journalist who fled his country to avoid being killed for a few things he tweeted about Muslim Prophet Muhammad. The video embedded here is of Saudi Sheikh Nasser al Omar calling on the King to enforce Islam’s death penalty for apostasy, which many Muslims believe Kashgari committed.

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

Another pointed reminder that freedom of [insert your favorite freedom here] is not a Muslim value. Never has been. Never will be.

Read it.

Chamtech wouldn’t say exactly how this works, but we have a theory: the nanocapacitors naturally form into a pattern that allow them to resonate with the cellphone signal in the air, and charge and discharge rapidly as they get hit by the electro-magnetic waves. This pulse emulates the way a cell tower works, allowing the smaller antennas in your cellphone or MiFi to receive signal from the passive layer sprayed onto the tree, wall, or side of the tent nearby. Because the nanocapacitors would do a lot of the hard work in finding signal, it would also mean that your phone antenna uses less power in order to get a signal, and that your battery could last far longer.

We have the technology.

Don Boudreaux reacts to Michelle Obama’s First Nanny tour.

Who the hell is she to tell – or even to advise – people outside of her own family what to eat?  Free and responsible men and women do not take seriously those who use their fame as a platform to issue advice about matters on which they know nothing – and politicians’ spouses (no less than politicians themselves, Hollywood entertainers, sports stars, and the like) have zero knowledge about each individual American’s tastes and preferences over a wide range of lifestyle options.  I’m downright repulsed by the media’s habit of mistaking a person’s celebrity for expertise, popularity for acumen, and visibility for enlightenment.

Read it.

Read it.

Most Americans wouldn’t know the difference between Boko Haram and Boca Raton, even though a Congressional report from November fingered the Nigerian jihadist group as an “emerging threat” to US interests.

In scarcely over two years, Boko Haram—it’s not their official name but rather a nickname that roughly means “Western education is sinful”—has pulled off a string of terrorist acts so ferociously audacious, one would think they’re jealous of all the attention the media have been lavishing upon al-Qaeda and the Mexican cartels.

And despite a widespread impression that they target mainly Christians, Boko Haram is known to murder anyone—including Muslims—who so much as utters a negative word about them. On Thursday, two presumed Boko Haram members drove up on motorcycles and murdered a sixty-year-old Muslim man as he was leaving a mosque. His crime was that he’d publicly criticized their tactics, so they publicly shot him dead.

Well, Christians and Jews do the same thing! Oh, wait….

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