Read it.

According to his official record, Fazl is a war criminal who has massacred thousands of people, has close relationships with al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, is involved in narcotics trafficking, and is so senior in the Taliban hierarchy that he once threatened the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Omar. He is considered to pose a “high risk” to American forces and our allies if released.

Really — if Obama were actually a Muslim, what would he have done differently?

Read it.

Hollywood lost a legend yesterday when it was announced that renowned sword master and Olympian Bob Anderson died at a hospital in England early on New Years’ Day.

The name may not be familiar, but his work surely is. If you’ve ever been awed by a sword fighting scene in a movie then you have Bob Anderson to thank. With a career spanning over 55 years, Anderson has contributed his skills as a swordsman, stuntman and fight coordinator to some of the best well known films in Hollywood.

Anderson’s first film work was in 1952 when he choreographed stage fights and coaching Errol Flynn on the swashbuckler film ‘The Master of Ballantrae.’ From there he went on to become one of the industry’s most sought after sword masters and has worked on several well-known movies as ‘Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back’, ‘Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi’, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, ‘The Princess Bride’, ‘The Mask of Zorro’, ‘Pirates of the Carribean: Curse of the Black Pearl’, ‘The Three Musketeers’, and ‘Highlander’ (both the series and  original movie).

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If you’re visiting Atlanta and aren’t looking to be shot in the face, swarmed by smack dealers, stopped by cops merely for being white, or set ablaze by an HIV-positive crackhead squatter, stay away from the area known as “The Bluff.”

Cue the fat-necked politicians to stroll The Bluff’s blown-out streets being photographed for campaign ads in oddly inappropriate Tor Johnson zombie poses, blaming the homeowners who fled the area rather than the residents who scared them into fleeing.

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

A question the well-funded sociologists and overpaid politicians never seem brave enough to pose is why conditions always seem to degenerate when an area becomes majority-black. It’s deemed hateful to ask why Haiti melted into putrefaction after they slaughtered all the French or why Zimbabwe went to seed when they started decapitating the white farmers. Scanning the globe, it’s hard to deny that conditions are better for blacks when they’re around whites than when they aren’t. Why is that? It’s an honest question based on honest observations. One needn’t inject “hate” into that question—or maybe one does, if one wants to avoid the question altogether. And until one can ask that question without fear of being charged with a hate crime—or at least a career-destroying thoughtcrime—there will never be answers for places such as The Bluff.

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Bloomberg News has a dispatch on the surge in intercity bus operators like Megabus.com and BoltBus. Left unexplored are two policy angles: first, how inconvenient and intrusive federally mandated airport security procedures, which don’t apply to bus travel, have helped to make buses a more attractive option than flying for some trips. And second, how the market is meeting the same need for intercity transportation that President Obama wants to address by spending $53 billion in taxpayer dollars on high speed rail. What a contrast between the efficiency of an entrepreneurial, market-driven, dynamic approach and the cost of a government-driven, central planning approach.

Compared to trains, buses are more flexible (using the existing road network, their routes and destinations can be changed ‘on the fly’), less expensive (no need for costly rail infrastructure), and safer (they don’t fall down if the engine stops), more secure (nobody highjacks a bus to Cuba or drives it into an office building). So, of course, ‘progressive’ politicians and activists are all for rail.

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We’ve certainly talked about how ridiculous patents have gotten in the way of health care professionals and doctors providing the best care they can. Beyond basic things like gene patents, the idea that diagnostic tests are patentable is somewhat horrifying for anyone with any sense of decency when it comes to trying to keep people healthy. But, apparently the issue doesn’t stop there, and the medical community is suddenly grappling with some doctors using aggressive copyright enforcement to block competing diagnostic tests from being available.

As I shall ever maintain, the whole concept of ‘intellectual property’ is bogus.

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Oh, yeah, diversity. Great stuff, ain’t it?

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So why do you pay taxes? Ask Obama — after all, he’s The Smartest Guy In The Room™.

(Two words: ‘concealed carry’)

Read it.

There is nothing new under the sun.

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Notice that this sort of thing happens in blue states like Minnesota, not red states like Texas.

Notice also that the rioters were not white people. Deduce from that what you will.

The moral, I suppose, is that civilization faces various threats against which we do not yet have adequate antidotes.

Other than, oh, say, armed citizens who would quell such riots before they properly begin. As sometimes happens in, oh, red states like Texas.

Minnesota has a shall-issue concealed carry law that’s worked well, despite the metro DFL’s prediction of street bloodbaths. But the law does allow establishments to ban concealed carry, and the Mall of America does so. Which is one reason I rarely go there. I figure I can go other places that choose not to make me an easy target.

The problem with leaving such civil disorders for the police to handle is that when police aren’t on hand you have no recourse. It’s difficult for a corpse to get much satisfaction from suing some gang-banger who’s probably on welfare anyway.

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I guess ‘diversity’ is only a sham after all.

Freeberg lays out the telltale signs.

Things, usually things that are part of a cherished tradition, that some busybody with authority thinks need to go the way of the Dodo bird because they’re not secular enough in nature. My prongs are not part of any kind of test, they are observations. Observations which, from what I can tell, endure from one “War on Christmas” incident to the next…not a single one of the three ever falter or fail. There may be exceptions, somewhere, but I’m still waiting to find some.

Somehow, the atheist and the Buddhist and the Hindu and the Muslim are supposed to suffer some actual injury when they see a Nativity display on an Air Force base, like a slug writhing in agony beneath a salt shaker.

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

Once again, the Oxymoron Party manifests itself.

Read it.

An “irreplaceable” piece of public art created by one of Britain’s best known artists, Dame Barbara Hepworth, has been stolen by suspected metal thieves.

Looking at the picture, I’d class that as a public service.

PIRACY is people with weapons boarding a ship at sea and stealing stuff, up to and including the ship, and possibly doing a mischief to the crew and/or passengers.

Ripping a DVD is not piracy.

Getting a movie through Bit Torrent is not piracy.

Passing around a scan of a book is not piracy.

IT’S ISN’T THEFT, EITHER. (Do You Hear Me, CongressMorons?)

THEFT is when you take something and the person from whom you took it NO LONGER HAS IT.

Making a copy is not theft. It Just Isn’t.

What it might be is COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT, which is a legally actionable offense, but NOT PIRACY and NOT THEFT.

<RANT>

One of the things that most vexes my spirit about modern life is the eagerness with which people, who want to gain some artificial advantage over their opponents by perverting the language, take words that have perfectly clear, consensually understood, and long-established words and use them like a porn starlet’s asshole, merely because it gives then a conversational stick with which to beat their enemies.

This is not ‘spin’, this is not ‘public relations’, this is not ‘controlling the narrative’, this is a VIOLATION OF ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL RULES OF HUMAN SOCIETY.

Stop it. Just stop it.

</RANT>

Megan McArdle, as she so often does, lays out some inconvenient truth.

A couple of days ago, I referred to the fact that poor people face some of the highest marginal tax rates in America. I received several emails from economics professors, gently correcting me: they face all the highest marginal tax rates in America. Because they lose benefits and tax credits, it can actually cost them money to get better jobs. That some of them take those better jobs anyway is a stunning testament to the power of character.

Read it.

That’s not how they would put it, of course, but that’s what it is.

Yes, retail bookstores, in what may be the single most backward thinking request of all time, are asking the general public (i.e. customers) to boycott Amazon due to the release of this phone app. For those too busy playing solitaire to really think this through, let me break this down for you. Amazon can offer goods at lower prices than many retail stores, they release an app that allows consumers to verify whether that’s the case on an individual product, the customer stands only to save money through this app, and retailers are asking customers to boycott the company saving them money over it. It’d be like boycotting a doctor for offering a cancer cure because, well, what about all the other doctors who have been making money offering chemo treatments?

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Lawyers representing a non-profit Maryland group are suing a White Marsh paintball park for not letting them play.

Why? Because they’re blind.

Paintball is a visual sport. But it’s doubtful that’s what lawyers for Blind Industries and Services of Maryland, a non-profit whose stated “purpose is to positively change people’s attitudes about blindness,” were thinking when they filed the first-of-its-kind lawsuit against Route 40 Paintball Park in U.S. District Court.

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On Saturday, one of the replacement workers was beaten with something “similar to a baseball bat” and hospitalized. However, according to the Toledo Blade, police do not think the labor dispute has anything to do with the beating.

Of course not. These days, the police are unionized, too.

Look for … the Union label…. Be sure to wipe the blood off first.

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By reaching out to China — as well as a handful of up-and-coming foreign powers like India, Korea and Russia — to build the experimental new nuclear reactors, there is no mistaking the message: The prospects are brighter for a nuclear power start-up to make it in China than in the U.S. When Gates went looking for partners, he landed in Beijing, not Seattle. In fact, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out in February after Gates met with the Chinese scientific establishment earlier this year, “Current U.S. rules don’t even cover the type of technology TerraPower hopes to use.” Ouch.

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Startups thrive on discontinuities and disruption. NPR and Kaiser Health News broke a major story that Walmart intends to become the largest provider of primary care in the country. While Walmart backed away from some of what was reported in their Request for Information, there’s enough wiggle room in their statement to drive a truck through. In my view, this is the biggest news in healthcare since health reform. Regardless of how one feels about Walmart, it’s indisputable that they have a massive footprint and ripple effect that is good news for healthtech companies.

Hey, ‘buy local’ whiners! Let’s see your mom & pop shop do that!

With 1.4 million employees and hundreds of millions of customer visits every month, Wal-Mart’s impact is without parallel. It’s one reason that the Sierra Club partnered with Walmart on its Sustainability Program. At one time, Walmart would have been a target of scorn by the Sierra Club but they saw the impact they could have. The effect of Sierra Club’s partnership with Walmart may have had a more positive outcome on the environment than just about any other Sierra Club initiative.

And the Sierra Club enters the ranks of the ‘progressive’ organizations who are willing to surrender their principles in exchange for power. My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

I believe the fundamental reason that the HealthIT systems in place are so abysmal (speaking from experience of having implemented dozens of these systems – many of which are developed on late 60’s technology) has been that decision-making in healthcare is incredibly convoluted, consensus-driven and drawn out.

Most of it caused by government regulations and the heavily government-regulated insurance industry. Let’s put the blame where it belongs. Good luck to Walmart trying to push that rope.

Read it. And weep.

ScienceDaily is reporting a truly depressing new study that finds that when it comes to complicated economic issues, people default to trusting government to address them.

Read it.

When smuggling enforcement operations reach a publication called Small Wars Journal, perhaps it’s time for the government to wake up to what’s happening on our southern border.

This is a significant event and represents an escalation in cross border violence. According to Javier Pena, the new head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Houston Division, “Everybody is surprised at the brazenness…We haven’t seen this type of violence, which concerns us.” [1].

No shit, Sherlock.

All captured Zetas had military style (short) haircuts with no tattoos evident in the booking photos so unit discipline is noted.

In other words, these weren’t just common street hoods — these were serious professionals.

Perhaps, now that we’re out of Iraq, we could use some of the expertise presumably obtained there to attempt to cope with what’s going on closer to home.

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Rick Perry has done something his opponents have been hoping he’d do for years: retire. But it’s not what the governor’s detractors had in mind.

Perry officially retired in January so he could start collecting his lucrative pension benefits early, but he still gets to collect his salary — and has in turn dramatically boosted his take-home pay.

Guess he’s given up on running for President. Who’d vote for him now? He’s exposed himself as one of those who are honest only while people are watching, and sometimes not even then.

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In a new report this week PwC predicts US manufacturing will undergo a renaissance thanks to cheap energy, with shale gas saving industry $11.6bn in lower, not higher bills. By remaining wary of climate change mitigation policies, the US economy seems to have dodged a bullet.

Amazing how well that works. The key characteristic of all the hard times going around is that they are mostly self-inflicted (if you suppose that governments and their peoples are on the same side, which is growing increasingly difficult to believe).

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Will the last one left turn out the lights?

The last time a Democratic governor of New York raised taxes on “millionaires,” the job-creators voted with their feet. Rush Limbaugh and Thomas Golisano moved to Florida. Glenn Beck moved to Texas. Stephen Schwarzman decamped to Paris.

Trying to grasp why the current governor, Andrew Cuomo, would want to repeat this pattern, I took a look at the New York State campaign finance filings for his campaign. The first big gift that comes up is $25,000 from S. Daniel Abraham of Palm Beach, whose billions come from the Slim-Fast diet drink. Why shouldn’t Mr. Abraham fund Mr. Cuomo’s campaign? It’s good, after all, for the economy in Palm Beach and in the rest of Florida, where there is no state income tax at all.

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Remember that the unemployment rate is not “how many people don’t have jobs?”, but “how many people don’t have jobs and are actively looking for them?” Let’s say you’ve been looking fruitlessly for five months and realize you’ve exhausted every job listing in your area. Discouraged, you stop looking, at least for the moment. According to the government, you’re no longer unemployed. Congratulations?

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Good luck. They’d be better off just selling it to the Chinese, which they’ll probably wind up doing anyway. The Chinese might have some prayer of understanding the technology.

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The action plan, launched by equalities minister Lynne Featherstone, said that a child’s early years have a “profound influence on their life chances”.

I wonder who ‘she’ was before the operation?

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain. Or any country that has an ‘Equalities Minister’.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in Barney Frank’s district.

Read it.

I’ve recently fallen into the habit of pulling and tugging at ATM slots before I slide my card through because I fear that someone nefarious has stuck one of these 3D-printed card skimmers over the opening. This skimmer, found in California, was 3D-printed to resemble the real Chase ATM slot almost perfectly.

Wildly enough, there’s a pinhole camera connected to a full PCB hidden under the plate and the ports designed to assist the visually impaired seem to be unimpeded, which means nothing would seem amiss even as this thing grabbed your card account number, PIN, and, presumably, the security code on the back of your card in some cases. The fact that this barnacle of electronics is attached, parasitically, to one of the most secure and human-proof devices in existence is an amazing feat.

One protection is to use a local or regional bank — or, better yet, a Credit Union — rather than one of the national megabanks. Scammers are going to be after Chase or Citibank, not Widespot Credit Union.

Read it. All of it is true. I tell you three times.

Read it.

 In August 2011, Download.com started wrapping legitimate 3rd party software into their own installer which by default installs a wide variety of adware and other questionable software on users machines. It also does things like redirect user search queries and change their Internet home page. At first their installer forced people to accept the malware or close the installer (see screen shot of infected VLC installer in this article). Later they added a non-default “decline” button hidden way on the left side of the panel. Also, the initial installer shown in the previous screen shot claimed the software was “SAFE, TRUSTED, AND SPYWARE FREE”. In an unusual show of honesty, they removed that claim from the rogue installer.

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Soon to be a major motion picture, no doubt.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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To give pupils a lesson in “sustainability” they’ll never forget, headmaster Rob Benzie of Ansford Academy in Castle Cary, Somerset, ordered a “No Power Day … as an experiment to see if we can lower our carbon footprint”.

Join the SCA, you can do that any weekend.

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Science Daily is reporting a truly depressing new study that finds that when it comes to complicated economic issues, people default to trusting government to address them.

Matt Welch takes out the garbage.

Consider for a moment the paradoxical pain of being a best-selling political pundit so successful that American presidents don’t just seek but heed your advice. You have lobbied in your columns for the commander in chief to deploy your signature catch phrases, and he has. You have, in times of both crisis and sloth, advocated robust federal action in the name of national “greatness,” and the people in power have mostly followed suit. You have been flattered by invitations to the White House and pecked at by lesser partisans, yet you’ve maintained your critical distance in the patriotic spirit of post-ideological problem solving. All this influence and success, and somehow the country still sucks.

Do something. Is there a two-word phrase in politics more loaded with disguised ideological content? Embedded within is both an urgent call for powerful government action and an up-front declaration that the policy details don’t matter. The bigger the crisis, the more the urgency, the sparser the detail. On September 30, 2008, in a classic of the do-something genre, Brooks argued that the Troubled Asset Relief Program should be rammed through Congress over public objections because the federal government needed “to give people a sense that somebody was in charge, that something was going to be done.” Did that “something” involve buying up toxic assets? Introducing or relaxing certain banking regulations? Taking over or winding down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Not important. “What we need in this situation,” Brooks declared, “is authority.”

In 1948, President Truman campaigned, successfully as it turned out, against the ‘do-nothing Congress’. Since Teddy Roosevelt parachuted into the Presidency, the motto in Washington is ‘Do something, even if it’s wrong.’ And that’s what has gotten us into the fix we’re in today — because when Washington ‘does something’, the odds are overwhelming that it will just make the situation worse. But they still do what they do, because they are essentially a one-trick pony. No matter is too trivial or irrelevant to the established purpose of the Federal government to escape the notice — and the attention — of Chuck Schumer or Al Franken. No matter is so clear-cut that John McCain or his comedy sidekick Lindsey Graham won’t want to craft some sort of compromise that only spends half as much (which we still can’t afford). No politician in the history of the United States, so far as I am aware, has had the courage to say ‘I’m here to keep somebody worse from causing the sort of trouble someone in this office could so easily cause.’ I would vote for such a person.

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Witnesses reported hearing a “tremendous noise” just a few moments before the accident on the Yamaguchi prefecture highway amid terrible driving conditions.

While the majority of the 14 vehicles – which also included a Japanese supercar Nissan GT-R Skyline and a Toyota Prius – were travelling along the Osaka Prefecture-bound bended lane at least one Mercedes CL600 was driving in the opposite direction.

Television footage showed the cars – either wrecked or destroyed – spread across the highway, in a trail of crumpled metal and broken glass. Several of the vehicles were wedged up against the metal barriers.

Well, sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it don’t.

John Hinderaker points out some inconvenient truth.

Under the U.K.’s National Health Service, death panels put patients who are believed to be terminally ill on a “death pathway.” Of course, it is sometimes inconvenient to mention the fact to the patient’s relatives:

NHS doctors are failing to inform up to half of families that their loved ones have been put on a scheme to help end their lives, the Royal College of Physicians has found.

Gotta love that government health care! Through the mercy of the Obamassiah, we can have that here!

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I find it curious that the government of Iran spends so much effort on the charade that these students aren’t doing what the government of Iran wants done. Certainly nobody in the ‘developing world’ buys that story.

There may be some dimwitted people in the West — in fact, there almost certainly are a great number of such people — who are fooled by this pretense, but none of them are of any importance.

“How long must we endure the presence of the British in Iran … when they interfere in affairs that relate to the country’s national interests … and commit treachery against the Iranian people?” Larijani asked, as he denounced Britain’s “excessive” reaction.

I’m curious as to what relationship this Larijani fellow thinks exists between the British and the ‘Iranian people’ that would make the term ‘treachery’ anything other than a random mouth-fart.

Is puzzle.

Read it.

Clue: Obama and the Democrats. That’s just me, of course; the author of the article doesn’t even attempt to answer the question.

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The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for Nebraska, charges that UNK and its employees engaged in a pattern or practice of violating the Fair Housing Act or denied rights protected by the act by denying reasonable accommodation requests by students with psychological or emotional disabilities seeking to live with emotional assistance animals in university housing.

‘Emotional assistance animals’? One would think that kids who are emotionally dependent on a dog or a cat really don’t belong in college.

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The US military has built a stone circle in its Air Force academy to give pagans, druids and witches somewhere to practice their religion.

And read Fallen Angels by Jerry Pournelle et al. to find out how this story ends.

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Comfort Suites will pay $132,500 to settle a disability discrimination lawsuit filed against the hotel chain on behalf of a San Diego hotel clerk with autism, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced Monday.

Tarsadia further agreed to sweeping changes, including revising its policies and procedures with respect to ADA compliance.

One of those sweeping changes, I’ll bet you, is a determination never again to hire somebody with a disability, even if it means spending whatever it takes to automate that job so as not to run any risk by hiring someone at all.

And the dimwitted wonder why companies aren’t hiring….

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This city has long been a resettlement site for refugees, sent here by the State Department for a chance at a better life. More than 60 languages are spoken in the school system, with Somalis, Sudanese, Iraqis and other recent arrivals mixing with children whose ancestors came from Quebec to work in the mighty textile mills along the Merrimack River.

I don’t suppose that the inhabitants were consulted about whether they wanted to turn their quiet New England town into some sort of U.N. dumping ground. Why don’t they go to New York City, which delights in that kind of thing?

In a highly unusual move, Mayor Ted Gatsas and the city’s Board of Aldermen asked the State Department in July to halt resettlements here for now. A tide of more than 2,100 refugees over the last decade — most recently, Bhutanese families coming from camps in Nepal — has been more than the city of 109,500 can assure jobs and decent housing for, Mr. Gatsas said.

Oh, as if that’s ever been a consideration.

Read it.

“When everybody’s somebody
Then no-one’s anybody.”

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How will you handle even simple purchases without power, communications or cash? As we increasingly transact via credit cards, online and even cell phones, cash has become much less prevalent. If the ATMs are down, and you don’t have enough emergency cash on hand, what do you do?

Already, it seems that for a broad range of demographics, especially those under 25, cash is already dead. Or, if there are emergency radio broadcasts and the broadcasts says that emergency help is located at a certain park in a certain city, what good is that information to a GPS reliant person who never learned to read a map and doesn’t own any maps?

Mormons will be fine; they’re required to have a year’s supply of food on hand. The rest of us, well….

Read it.

Read it.

“The New Malthusians” sounds like the name of a new wave or punk band, but just as new wave is old school, there is never anything new about Malthusianism no matter how many times it gets punked. Only the band members change.

When the world’s population reached the estimated 7 billion mark a few weeks ago, the most famous Malthusian of modern times, Paul Ehrlich, made a few encore appearances for old time’s sake, but for the most part Ehrlich and his generation of Malthusian rock stars, such as Garrett Hardin, Lester Brown, and the Club of Rome, appear about a fresh as Keith Richards after a 7 am wake up call. The old guys really need to be retired (well, actually, Garrett Hardin is long dead anyway), to make room for the new kids. The criteria for making the list are simple: a winner’s Malthusianism has to be essentially unmodulated from the older kind, be relentlessly monotonic, be extremely lucrative, and/or a pretext for increased centralized political power.

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Sure, we need more of those people in this country! Open the borders! Make ’em all citizens! All is forgiven! Y’all come on in! Barack will give you a pony!

Read it.

Thereby proving that the missile sheild is necessary. Thanks, Dmitri. We couldn’t have done it without you.