Read it.

DNA stores our genetic code in an elegant double helix. But some argue that this elegance is overrated. “DNA as a molecule has many things wrong with it,” said Steven Benner, an organic chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Florida.

Nearly 30 years ago, Benner sketched out better versions of both DNA and its chemical cousin RNA, adding new letters and other additions that would expand their repertoire of chemical feats. He wondered why these improvements haven’t occurred in living creatures. Nature has written the entire language of life using just four chemical letters: G, C, A and T. Did our genetic code settle on these four nucleotides for a reason? Or was this system one of many possibilities, selected by simple chance? Perhaps expanding the code could make it better.

We still don’t know how genes work and they want to make new ones.

Read it.

I suspect that it’s not so much that they’re afraid of fat as it is they’re against anything the people enjoy.

Plus they just like to tell people what to do; that’s a large part of it.

Read it.

While the idea of timber towers may conjure up visions of multi-storey Swiss chalets, or high-rise log-cabins, these skyscrapers are not the traditional timber-framed buildings we’re used to seeing. Instead, the designs take advantage of recent innovations in “mass wood” to create vast solid timber panels that can support buildings to a much taller height than ordinary wood can.

Green’s Baobab uses Cross Laminated Timber, or CLT. This consists of several layers of timber board glued together at 90 degrees to form large structural sheets up to 40cm thick. The cross-lamination provides the material’s dimensional stability and strength.

Ammo Grrrll doesn’t like what she sees.

Oh, God. Make it stop; make it stop. We are $18 bazillion quadrillion in debt (seriously, I looked it up…), half added since Dear Leader has been in charge. Obamacare accomplished absolutely none of the promised benefits (“Cover 40 Million people! Bend the Cost Curve! Keep your Insurance If You Like It! No Illegals, Except for the Illegals Who Don’t Have Insurance!”) in exchange for destroying the best health care delivery system in the world.

Millions upon millions of Federal employees are vulnerable to identity theft, blackmail, threats, at least four times as many people as the Administration admitted to at first.

Dear Leader is trying his best to lose against our beheading, gay-murdering, woman-mutilating enemies in the Middle East, but as slowly as possible so as to leave the biggest, most intractible mess for the next person in charge. The timing is tricky. If he’s not careful, Iran will have the bomb before Dear Leader is out of office. I’m sure it’s part of the backdoor deal to wait until January 21, 2017 to fire one at Israel. Was ensuring that Iran gets the bomb the ultimate pricetag for this Man-Choom-ian Candidate to pay back his consigliere, Valerie Jarrett, who was born there? She made the Obamas rich beyond any possible dreams of obscene avarice even before the post-Presidential loot rolls in like a tsunami.

Read it.

For some people who experience traumatic events like robberies, war, or abuse, the emotional effects continue for decades after the episode has ended. Sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are susceptible to anxiety, flashbacks, and nightmares, which isn’t always ameliorated by treatments like therapy and medication. Now researchers from the University of California Los Angeles have developed a non-invasive patch that stimulates the brain to treat symptoms of PTSD, according to a study published today in the journal Neuromodulation: Technology at the Neural Interface.
The patch uses a technique called trigeminal nerve stimulation (TNS). It’s hooked up to a 9-volt battery with which it generates small electrical currents that move through the forehead to parts of the trigeminal nerve, the largest nerve in the brain. The nerve is connected to many different parts of the brain, including the nucleus tractus solitarius, a structure found in the brainstem that is thought to integrate information from several disparate parts of the brain, including those in which patients with PTSD have abnormal activity. Targeting this nerve in particular makes TNS different from other neuromodulation techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), used to stimulate neuron activity in the prefrontal cortex, and transcranial direct current stimulation(tDCS), which triggers brain cells to release painkilling compounds.

Great news.

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By now, it has been nearly forty years since the Cultural Revolution officially ended, yet in China, considering the magnitude and significance of the event, it has remained a poorly examined, under-documented subject. Official archives are off-limits. Serious books on the period, whether comprehensive histories, in-depth analyses, or detailed personal memoirs, are remarkably few. Ji Xianlin’s The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which has just been released in English for the first time, is something of an anomaly.

At the center of the book is the cowshed, the popular term for makeshift detention centers that had sprung up in many Chinese cities at the time. This one was set up at the heart of the Peking University campus, where the author was locked up for nine months with throngs of other fallen professors and school officials, doing manual labor and reciting tracts of Mao’s writing. The inferno atmosphere of the place, the chilling variety of physical and psychological violence the guards daily inflicted on the convicts with sadistic pleasure, the starvation and human degeneration—all are vividly described. Indeed, of all the memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, I cannot think of another one that offers such a devastatingly direct and detailed testimony on the physical and mental abuse an entire imprisoned intellectual community suffered. After reading the book, a Chinese intellectual friend summed it up to me: “This is our Auschwitz.”

This is what electing people like Bernie Sanders inevitably leads to. We’re already seeing the signs among college students, academics, and the media, not coincidentally Sanders’ most enthusiastic supporters.

David Cole is delightfully dyspeptic today.

You see, the Oscars are supposed to “reflect America.” Didn’t you know that? Well, apparently it’s true. “You don’t reflect America, your industry doesn’t reflect America,” a coalition of minority activists bellowed last week. Will Smith agreed, telling Good Morning America in a live satellite hookup from his solid-gold mansion under the sea that the Oscars should “reflect” American “beauty.” Al Sharpton, who’s normally so wary of bandwagons, uncharacteristically raised his voice in support, claiming that the Oscars don’t “reflect modern America.” And at a recent event in L.A., actor David Oyelowo claimed that the Motion Picture Academy “doesn’t reflect this nation.”

…

Of course, the truth is the Academy’s nominees are not supposed to “reflect America.” Entertainment-industry hiring practices in general are not supposed to “reflect America.” They’re supposed to reflect the available talent pool, and nothing else. The notion that Hollywood is supposed to reflect America is a pernicious bit of nonsense that even some conservatives buy into when they counter the current Oscar protests by (correctly) pointing out that black actors get hired roughly in proportion to the percentage of black people in the U.S. However, making that point merely plays into the fiction that “representing America” is somehow the goal. It isn’t. Acting isn’t like food-service work, retail or clerical work, factory work, janitorial work, or customer-service work. No one is ever forced into acting by a bad economy. No man has ever said, “They’re closing the plant and shipping the jobs to India, so I guess that means I’ll have to learn Shakespeare in order to support my family.”

Read it.

I take it you all know by now this is quite an ugly story, namely that both early progressives and late 19th century American economists were often quite appalling racists and eugenicists, and that such racism was built into the professional structure of economics in a fairly fundamental way, including but not restricted to the American Economics Association.

Read it.

This sort of thing make me appreciate Proctor & Gamble.

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I’ve been expecting the day would some when the identity politics Left would turn on Martin Luther King Jr, and that day has arrived. Students at the University of Oregon (and surely elsewhere) are demanding that one of King’s most famous phrases, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” be taken down from a wall display in the student center because it is “not inclusive enough.”

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“Billions spent, but fewer people are using public transportation,” declares the Los Angeles Times. The headline might have been more accurate if it read, “Billions spent, so therefore fewer are using public transit,” as the billions were spent on the wrong things.

…

The situation is actually worse than the numbers shown in the article, which are “unlinked trips.” If you take a bus, then transfer to another bus or train, you’ve taken two unlinked trips. Before building rail, more people could get to their destinations in one bus trip; after building rail, many bus lines were rerouted to funnel people to the rail lines. According to California transit expert Tom Rubin, survey data indicate that there were an average of 1.66 unlinked trips per trip in 1985, while today the average is closer to 2.20. That means today’s unlinked trip numbers must be reduced by nearly 25 percent to fairly compare them with 1985 numbers.

Mass transit: Politicians spending billions of dollars on systems that take you from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to go at times that are convenient for them, not for you.

And they wonder why people prefer to own and drive automobiles.

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The global warming which recently hit the USA, has spread to a large area of East Asia, with reports of a brutal cold snap which has killed at least 85 people in Taiwan, and confirmed snowfall as far south as the Japanese island Okinawa, on the Northern edge of the Tropics.

How about that Global Warming, eh?

Read it.

Even though there are a few minorities shown, the ad leaves the impression of being very white. And Simon and Garfunkel is very white music.

Matthew Yglesias agrees, he complains that the ad is too white.

Well, really, there aren’t many people more white than Bernie. AlGore, maybe.

Read it.

As if the Obama administration could find its ass with both hands when it comes to stemming the rise of the Islamic Stat anywhere.

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A 17-year-old girl who was physically and sexually attacked in Sønderborg will herself face charges for using pepper spray to fend off her assailant.

This sort of breakdown in civil order is what fostered the rise of paramilitary militias in Germany between the world wars and eventually birthed the totalitarian Nazi regime. The first duty of a government, the very first duty of a government, is to protect its people from criminals and foreigners, and when any government falls down on that particular job, people make ‘alternative arrangements’.

Read it.

Well, autocratic states can do that sort of thing.

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City planners in Los Angeles who think (albeit very incorrectly) that they have control over how residents live are famously pushing for general plan to “get people out of their cars” in this massive city and onto bikes or into mass transit and creating communities nestled around transit hubs. It’s called their Mobility Plan 2035. It would recast the city with a heavy emphasis on pedestrian and bicycle traffic, possibly at the expense of supporting motor vehicles.

There’s a slight problem with such a plan: This does not appear to be how the citizens of Los Angeles actually want to live. Use of mass transit in Los Angeles and Orange County continues to decline even as more and more money is thrown at it. To the extent that residents rely on mass transit, they seem to prefer buses to light rail, and when the costs of riding buses goes up and the availability or quality of service goes down, riders take a hike.

Funny thing about that whole democracy business; people keep trying to make their own decisions.

Read it.

Faith schools have been accused of adopting an approach bordering on  “religious racism” by turning away pupils simply on the grounds of their religion.

I am not making this up. I’m curious as to what part of ‘faith schools’ these people don’t understand. Certainly their understanding of language leaves a lot to be desired.

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

And that’s it, in a nutshell — by controlling the words we use, these people are trying to control us. Understand what they’re doing, and resist.

Read it.

A new study suggests that a disproportionate number of professors are gay.

Doesn’t surprise me.

Read it.

Who’s winning in Iowa? That’s the question of the moment. But it’s also pertinent to ask who’s winning in Syria.

The answer is the very bad guys. Which very bad guys? It depends on the part of Syria in question.

Read it.

Perhaps Megyn Kelly ought to run for President. In a country where Obama gets two terms and Trump leads in the polls, how hard could it be?

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It appears based on London but, really, it could apply to every city with a river going through it.

Read it.

‘Continuously pretending that a group is somehow eventually going to become like the rest of us is perhaps the deepest form of disrespect,’ former chairman of the Equality and Human rights Commission say.

Ponder the situation where a European country has an ‘Equality and Human Rights Commission’.

Muslim communities are “unlike others in Britain” and “will not integrate in the same way”, according to the former head of the equalities watchdog.

If at all. But you’re not supposed to Notice that.

He went on to claim that we should accept that Muslims “see the world differently from the rest of us.”

Yes — as prey.

Read it.

Why not? Releasing lists of demands is all the rage on campus these days.

Read it.

No doubt you’ve had January 25, 2016 marked on your calendar this last decade, waiting for al-Gore’s shining prediction at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006, which actually began with one of his books in 1996. [I forget which one now, but I remember him saying we’d have to learn to get along without the internal combustion engine. And from then on he walked everywhere (small lie in aid of his larger truthiness)].

…

But the world he swore would be much worse, with flooding in Manhattan, droughts and super-hurricanes? No, they didn’t happen; and that nor’easter this past weekend was within normal limits for weather. So yet again #ClimateHell has been deferred. Funny, he bought a mansion on the beach, did Al, while he swore erosion was inescapable. But then he did a lot of that – check out his dealings with Occidental Petroleum, work that bore lots of fruit and none of it ecologically sound, or so the stories report. A do-as-I-say kind of guy, methinks. And a very sad one.

Perhaps the worst of it was another Nobel Peace Prize wasted on another hollow man. In 2007, Gore shared The Peace Prize with the beloved IPCC. They beat out Irena Sendler. (She lost in 2006 and 2008, too. She died at the age of 98 in 2009 so they could finally cross her off the list.)

This woman was an authentic achiever and a real hero. She was a Polish Catholic nurse/social worker who quietly saved at least 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto before she was captured and tortured. Though she lived, those war years obviously took their toll: she married three times but never had any children. Without a doubt the PTSD from which she surely suffered – given her heart-stopping work in the Warsaw Ghetto – had a life-changing impact.

Read it.

When you see a superhero or a supervillain heading deep into their super-high-tech super-secret lair, do you ever wonder how the heck they keep that secret?

Did they build this massive thing on their own? Did they get their architecture, engineering, and interior design degrees while they went through that training/backstory montage? No, of course not. They had henchpeople build it for them, outsourcing the complicated stuff to people who knew more about constructing an island fortress than they do. There’s only one problem with that plan. Letting more people in on a secret virtually ensures that it won’t stay secret for long.

Unless you’re the government, of course, and can put people in jail for talking. And even then you might wind up with a Hillary Clinton.

In order to figure out the average length of time before someone blows a conspiracy’s cover, Grimes looked at three well-documented conspiracies. One, the reprehensible Tuskegee syphilis experiment lasted for a long time, nearly 25 years. The other two, the FBI forensics scandal and the NSA’s PRISM program took less time to come to light. (Each was uncovered in about six years.)

NOTE: THESE ARE ALL GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACIES.

Read it.

It’s hard to remember who is allowed to criticize who.

Read it.

But even better are the less read The Economy of Cities (1970) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), twin volumes which do nothing less than demolish and rebuild macroeconomics. Economics went wrong, she explains, with the work her titles allude to, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Nations aren’t the proper unit of macroeconomic analysis; cities are.

Jacobs arrives at this conclusion by considering the stagflation of the 1970s– simultaneous high unemployment and high inflation, something that was not supposed to be possible under either left-wing (Keynesian) or right-wing (monetarist) economics. They were supposed to trade off. She points out that this condition– high prices and not enough work– is normal for backward regions; Western economists mistook the fitful but constant economic boom from Smith’s time on as a permanent condition.

Thinking in terms of national economies smears over the economic facts. Once we take off these lenses, we can see that the world consists not of developed and poor nations, but of dynamic and poor regions. One of the great advantages of this point of view, in fact, is that we become aware of the backward regions in the First World, and realize that they follow the same dynamics as the Third World. These days they may be comfortable enough due to transfer payments from richer regions, but they are economically passive nonetheless.

And the dynamic regions are centered around cities. (The one apparent exception: supply regions, rich in natural resources. We’ll get back to them below; for now we’ll just note that they’re rich because cities want the resources and come and get them. Arabs didn’t have to travel across the oceans to find people to hawk their oil to.)

Read it.

Two base jumpers are feared dead after jumping off a bridge over the Pacific ocean as one man tried to rescue his female companion, officials say.

Mary Katherine “Katie” Connell, from Ventura, California, first jumped off the 260-foot high Bixby Creek Bridge with one parachute and landed in the water below.

Footage not released by police shows that high waves overcame her shortly after landing, as reported by Monterey Herald.

The footage also shows her companion from Finland, who has not yet been named, jumping off the same bridge on about 7.30am Wednesday morning to rescue her. Both are now feared dead.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Well, economists who agree with the New York Times that ‘wealth inequality’ is ipso facto a horrible injustice.

These people — the top one-quarter of 1 percent of the country’s employed population — have enjoyed explosive gains in income and wealth in recent decades, even as salaries and wages stagnated for the typical American worker.

Note the use of the term ‘enjoyed’, as if this income had just dropped into their laps as they were somehow passing by on the street. No team of wild horses could get Nelson D. Schwartz to use the more accurate term ‘earned’, since that would be contrary to The Narrative.

Note that the entirety of the article is devoted to how much inequality is increasing — not one word attempts to justify the assumption that ‘wealth inequality’ is a Bad Thing.

They actually pay people to write this stuff.

Read it.

If you live in Portland, your lights may now be partly powered by your drinking water. An ingenious new system captures energy as water flows through the city’s pipes, creating hydropower without the negative environmental effects of something like a dam.

Small turbines in the pipes spin in the flowing water, and send that energy into a generator.

This is more accurately an ‘energy recovery system’ than a power generation system, since the move of the the water is the result of it being under pressure from municipal pumps, who I suspect use electricity.

Read it.

Why do people have so much trouble throwing things out? Turns out, the answer lies in people’s heads. Running through Kondo’s best advice and most of her book is the argument about the anxiety-induced limits of human decision-making. Seeing as an entire branch of economics studies exactly that, it’s no wonder that economists have a particular interest in her advice. Financial Times columnist Tim Harford agrees that Kondo’s methods are not only intuitive, but compelling to economists. Harford says that the clutter that piles up in apartments is a product of people’s cognitive blunders.

In my reading and practice of the eponymous “KonMari Method,” I found that Kondo does implictly touch on some important behavioral economics concepts and cognitive biases that prevent us from being tidy. She takes strong stances against these irrational mental habits that govern us. In other words, I think the reason Kondo-mania continues is because she has actually hit upon some good solutions to deal with these pervasive mental fallacies.

Read it.

Read it.

Ironically, several students and faculty have reacted to the notion they want to stifle free speech by savagely attacking the event, with some of them arguing it should be shut down.

Liberals are fascists. They prove it by their actions every day.

Freeberg does us a service.

As Trump haters and Palin haters begin their eighth straight day of lecturing the rest of us on the pointlessness of blind rage, while demonstrating how much of it they have…

Read it.

Politicians in Denmark are expected to vote today on a controversial law that would force refugees to hand over cash and valuables and delay family reunifications.

The bill has provoked international debate since it was announced last month, with the United Nations warning it would “fuel fear and xenophobia” but Danish politicians claiming it is “about creating equality between migrants and Danes”.

UPDATE: Approved.

Read it.

In Iran the commander of the IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) recently made public the fact that the IRGC was responsible for training (and often recruiting, arming and paying) 200,000 pro-Iran fighters in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan. This, in general, is no secret. It was long believed that as many as 50,000 Iranian created militiamen are fighting in Syria. There are somewhat smaller forces in Lebanon (about 25,000), Iraq (over 20,000) and Yemen (more than 15,000). Pakistan and Afghanistan were not happy with the IRGC publicly admitting that Iran has sponsored local (and often illegal) Shia militias.

This is not something new for the IRGC, which since the 1980s has had an elite organization whose main job was forming pro-Iran militias in foreign countries. This is the al Quds Force, which is a component of the IRGC. Also known as the Pasdaran, the IRGC is a paramilitary force of about 100,000 full timers that insures that any anti-government activity inside Iran is quickly eliminated. To assist the Pasdaran, there is a part-time, volunteer force, several hundred thousand Basej, which can provide additional manpower when street muscle is required. The Basej are usually young, Islamic conservative men, who are not afraid to get their hands dirty. If opponents to the government stage a large demonstration, it will often be broken up by Basej, in civilian clubs, using fists and clubs.

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States and regions all over the country are developing plans for high-speed or conventional-speed intercity passenger trains. One of the first steps in writing such plans is the “feasibility study.” But the people writing these studies have a curious definition of “feasible.”

I think they define ‘feasible’ as ‘something we can get away with’.

Not surprisingly, that study never actually answers, or even attempts to answer, whether such a train is feasible by any standard criteria, such as whether revenues could cover capital and operating costs, or just operating costs, or whether quantifiable benefits exceed costs. Instead, the study focuses mainly on, “How can we sell this clunker of an idea to enough politicians that we can get it funded?” Instead of quantifying benefits, the study relies on slogans like “quality of life,” “attract new business,” and “provide transportation alternatives.”

Yeah, what he said.

Read it.

A case can be made that divisive hot-button issues like inequality and immigration ultimately derive from housing dysfunction. Kevin Erdmann eloquently tells the tale. Matt Rognlie has famously argued that the increase in capital’s share of income, often blamed for inequality, is due largely to housing, once depreciation is taken into account. All of this reinforces the thesis of people like Ryan Avent, Edward Glaeser, and Matt Yglesias who have argued for years that housing supply constraints are to blame for high rents in powerhouse cities, and may constitute an important drag on productivity growth and a cause of macroeconomic stagnation. (See also Paul Krugman, quite recently.) Several of these writers argue that cities should eliminate restrictive zoning and other regulatory barriers to development, then let the free-market create housing supply. In a competitive marketplace, high prices are supposed to be their own cure. Zoning restrictions, urban permitting, and the de facto capacity of existing residents to veto new development are barriers to entry that prevent the magic of competition from taking hold and solving the problem.

My view is that the “market urbanist” diagnosis of the problem is more persuasive than its prescription for addressing it. As a positive matter, they just won’t win the political fights they propose. On normative grounds, I’m not sure that they should. The market urbanists present themselves as capitalist deregulators but I think they can be described with equal accuracy as radical redistributionists. The customary property rights surrounding homeownership in many cities and suburbs include much more than the use of a square of earth and whatever is built on it. Existing homeowners bought into particular neighborhoods in large part because of their “character”, which includes nice-sounding things like walkability or “charm”, as well as not-so-nice-sounding things like access to exclusionary education. Newer residents have bought and paid for those amenities, while older residents may feel they have earned them by helping to create them. Economists describe houses as a form of capital that provides a stream of services, rather than a cash flow, to owner-occupants. We should also describe the arrangement of neighborhoods as a form of capital that provides services people value. Property owners have disproportionate use of, and, informally, enjoy substantial control rights over this “neighborhood capital”, and these benefits have been capitalized into residential real-estate prices. (Location, location, location!) “Zoning reform” is an anodyne way to describe an expropriation of those customary rights. It amounts to diminishing residents’ ability to preserve or control the evolution of their neighborhoods, in order to challenge the exclusivity on which the value of existing neighborhood amenities may be based.

Read it.

As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, ten years ago today, Al Gore said we had only a decade left to save the planet from global warming. But Earth and humanity has been doing just fine since then.

People that know money over at Investor’s Business Daily, said that “We Know Al Gore’s Been Running A Global Warming Racket” and listed five ways they ascertain this, I’m going to list those, embellish them, and add a few of my own.

Read it.

James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, is one of the most vocal proponents of the idea that mass shootings have not been getting substantially more common. It isn’t “the nature and number of incidents” that have really changed, he once wrote; it’s “the extent and style of news coverage.”

Read it.

Details of their assessments, though shared with defense reporters over recent months, were publicly presented for the first last week by IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot during a conference in Tel Aviv, organized by the Institute for National Security Studies.

The most immediate consequence of the nuclear deal will be felt in the realm of expanding Iranian regional influence, and the looming increase in the trafficking of weapons and funds to terror organizations, made possible by sanctions relief.

…

Additionally, the Iranian military industry, already considered to be an advanced stage of development by Israel, will receive much more investment, allowing Iran to design and produce more accurate missiles, rockets, drones, and other types of weaponry that it can then traffic to its regional proxies through its Revolutionary Guard-Quds Force (IRGC) networks, or point at Israel directly from Iranian missile bases.

…

The nuclear deal changes that situation, at least for the next five years. Although Israel will make every effort to monitor and scrutinize Iran’s activities, the expectation within the defense establishment is that the risk of an imminent Iranian breakout to the bomb has substantially decreased for the next few years.

The thinking in Israel’s military establishment is that the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has not forfeited his ambition to build nuclear weapons. Far from it. He has, however, taken a tactical ‘pause’ to achieve sanctions relief and assure the future of his regime.

Read it.

This could be how our experiment with grassroots democracy finally ends. World leaders—the super-rich, their pet nonprofits, their media boosters, and their allies in the global apparat—gather in Paris to hammer out a deal to transform the planet, and our lives. No one asks much about what the states and the communities, the electorate, or even Congress, thinks of the arrangement. The executive now presumes to rule on these issues.

For many of the world’s leading countries—China, Russia, Saudi Arabia—such top-down edicts are fine and dandy, particularly since their supreme leaders won’t have to adhere to them if inconvenienced. But the desire for centralized control is also spreading among the shrinking remnant of actual democracies, where political give and take is baked into the system.

The will to power is unmistakable. California Gov. Jerry Brown, now posturing as the aged philosopher-prince fresh from Paris, hails the “coercive power of the state” to make people live properly by his lights. California’s high electricity prices, regulation-driven spikes in home values, and the highest energy prices in the continental United States, may be a bane for middle- and working-class families, but are sold as a wonderful achievement among our presumptive masters.

Read it.

Pair both wearing helmets when accident happened.

People who indulge in stupid ‘sports’ deserve what they get.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

In 2011, activist Esraa Abdel-Fattah helped ignite revolution on the streets of Egypt and was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Five years after the fall of autocrat Hosni Mubarak, she is shunned or insulted by Egyptians on those same streets.

“They say I am a traitor and foreign agent and that we are the people who destroyed the country. I hear it when I am passing people in the streets,” said Abdel-Fattah. “Some people still ask “what was wrong with Mubarak?”.

There’s no pleasing some people.

Read it.

Denmark has defended a plan to remove asylum seekers’ cash and jewellery from them, saying it puts refugees on an “equal” footing with other Danes.

Amid media scrutiny and UN condemnation of a number of migration-related reforms, the Danish government is on the brink of passing a law to seize cash and items worth more than about £1,000 from refugees, according to The Local.

Yet ruling right-wing party Venstre and anti-immigration coalition partners the Danish People’s Party (DPP) have said claims the measure is a violation of international commitments and human rights shows the law has been “grossly misunderstood.”

Anders Vistisen, an MEP from the DDP, said Danish citizens who suddenly become unemployed are also expected to sell their most valuable possessions to receive state support.

“The new law is about creating equality between migrants and Danes, so that everyone under the welfare system has the same possibility to receive public benefits,” he told The Local.

Welcome to socialism, guys. Yes, you get benefits, but the downside is that the government is entitled to all you have.

Read it.

The University of Missouri communications professor I dubbed “the scowling face of campus repression” has been slapped with a misdemeanor assault charge, according to the Columbia Prosecutor’s Office.

Authorities decided to charge her with third-degree assault for threatening to sic some “muscle” on a student-journalist attempting to cover the rally at Mizzou in the wake of President Tim Wolfe’s resignation in November. The charge, a Class C misdemeanor, carries a max sentence of 15 days in jail, The Kansas City Star reports.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer liberal fascist.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist and prominent libertarian academic, takes a stand.

I would much prefer a Pres. Sanders or a Pres. O’Malley than Trump. (I’m less certain about a Pres. H. Clinton, but I think that I’d even prefer a Pres. H. Clinton to a Pres. Trump.) My reasons are two:

(1) As one sensible commenter (I forget who) said, with any of the three Democrats we pretty much know what we’ll get; with Trump, there is no such knowledge. And while what we’ll get with any of the three Democrats will indeed be bad, I can imagine even worse coming from someone such as Trump.

(2) More importantly, whatever policies are implemented by a Pres. Sanders, a Pres. O’Malley, or a Pres. H. Clinton will be (correctly) understood by most people today, and by history, to be anti-free-market policies, yet whatever policies are implemented by a Pres. Trump will be (incorrectly) understood today, and by history, to be “free-market” policies.

He’s got a point. Trump has been all over the map on a number of significant issues, so far as I have been paying attention, which admittedly isn’t much.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

n an early scene of the new documentary “Weiner,” former Congressman and scandal subject Anthony Weiner is biking through New York City.

“Are you somebody I’m supposed to know?” a passerby asks.

“Believe me, no,” Weiner says.

Like it or not, a lot more people are going to know a lot more about Weiner with this movie.

Although why anyone would want to defies explanation. Few people are more appropriately named than Mr Weiner.

Read it.

British anarchists are among agitators who are stirring up trouble in Calais, where migrants and protesters stormed the port and boarded a ferry on Saturday, according to reports.

A number of Britons are said to be in Calais with No Borders, an anti-capitalist protest group accused of acting as agitators in the camp dubbed “The Jungle” that is home to an estimated 4,000 asylum seekers.

The port was forced to close for several hours and security forces were drafted in on Saturday evening when a crowd of around 350 people, said to be refugees and supporters, infiltrated secure areas at the quayside.

Well, it seems to me that, if the French were to move these ‘refugees’ elsewhere, such as BACK WHERE THEY CAME FROM, this wouldn’t be a problem.

According to The Sun one of the activists detained was a British man who was later released without charge.

And there’s the problem, right there. Every time one of these idiots is ‘released without charge’, they are encouraged to do it again. And again.

Local official Jean-Marc Puissesseau has estimated passenger numbers in the port have fallen by 40,000 compared to a year ago and the town’s shops and restaurants are suffering, with blame pointed at the squalid refugee camp and repeated interruption to ferry and rail services.

Boy, that French government is really effective, isn’t it?