Lileks.

Condolences to everyone by the Milwaukee Road train station: Hope you’re feeling better. How do I know you’re ill?

Simple. I have a new smartphone app called “Sickweather,” and it tracks illness in your immediate area. How? Does it listen for your hacking coughs, fix your location via GPS, cross-check with Walgreen Cold-and-Flu aisle trips, and upload it so the NSA and Chinese hackers can send you get-well cards?

No. It scans Facebook. Well, you say, what doesn’t? The accuracy of the app depends on people staggering to their computer, feeling like achy sweaty sloths, and typing URGH I HAVE FLU so people can LIKE it, and companies can send you a coupon for something that makes you feel 17 percent better and tastes like blueberries grown in Chernobyl.

When I first opened it up, little markers indicating disease rained down on Minneapolis like the Judgement of Heaven, and any rational person would instantly run outside and daub an X on the front door in lamb’s blood. (We were out. Had it on the list, too.) Downtown was a seething mass of SICK icons, concentrated in two areas: Right outside the Milwaukee Depot, and the Warehouse District.

Columbia the Gem of the Ocean

I learned to sing this in elementary school. I don’t suppose they do that any more.

Hot Hot Hot

Hey, it’s Texas in the summertime.

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Damage done by laser weapons is a function of power and time. The longer a laser can stay on a target, like a drone or an incoming missile, the more damage it can do. The more powerful that laser is, the less time it needs to spend burning its target. The U.S. Navy already has a 30-kilowatt laser mounted on a ship. Yesterday, at a summit on directed energy weapons in Washington, D.C., the Navy announced it plans to go bigger: 150 kilowatts.

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He was attempting to pass a slow-moving bobtail Peterbilt tractor when he got hung up by a white Ford Econoline squatting in the passing lane. On his YouTube page, Machine stated that the van, which apparently belonged to a plumbing company, was traveling along between 60 and 70 miles per hour along a stretch of highway with a stated speed limit of 70 mph. Confronted with the slow-moving van blocking the left lane, and traffic in the right lane, Machine called the number on the back of the Econoline and politely asked him to get out of the way.

In the Econoline, the passenger picked up and was momentarily confused as Machine asked him to ask his driver to move out of the lane and let traffic pass. The van sped up, passed a tractor-trailer, and got out of the way, much to the relief of the traffic behind him.

We have the technology.

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When many lower-income Americans feel isolated and empty, they yearn for physical social networks. All across US, this happens organically at McDonald’s.

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Pretty bad when you have to read about interesting Texas news in a British newspaper.

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Despite some recent budgetary setbacks, a long-running American experiment in socialism is still going strong, and yet somehow it remains one of the country’s best-kept secrets.

The federal experiment involves 1.3 million Americans—less than 1% of the population, but 75% of the participants are themselves millennials, so Bernie’s supporters should feel right at home. Unless they feel like they’ve arrived in socialist heaven.

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POLICE say a rancher jumped on his horse and lassoed a man who was trying to steal a bicycle in the parking lot of a Walmart in Oregon, USA.

The Medford Mail Tribune reports 28-year-old Robert Borba was at the store getting dog food Friday when he heard a woman screaming that someone was trying to steal her bike.

The rancher says he quickly got his horse out of its trailer, grabbed a rope, rode over and lassoed the man and bicycle.

“I seen this fella trying to get up to speed on a bicycle,” said Borba, who was planning on helping brand cattle in California that afternoon. “I wasn’t going to catch him on foot. I just don’t run very fast.”

…

It was a first for Borba too, as he had only ever used his lasso skills to rope in cattle before. “I use a rope every day, that’s how I make my living,” he said. “If it catches cattle pretty good, it catches a bandit pretty good.”

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Not something you see every day.

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It requires 25 MW. The new Zumwalt destroyer produces over twice that.

WSJ article here.

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An amazing achievement, and a slap in the face to those who say that persistent racism and sexism are holding back minorities.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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But you’d never know that from listening to Democrats or their lackeys in the press.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be remotely tempted to quit the 2016 me so that I could be a one-billion-dollar-richer me in 1916.  This fact means that, by 1916 standards, I am today more than a billionaire.  It means, at least given my preferences, I am today materially richer than was John D. Rockefeller in 1916.  And if, as I think is true, my preferences here are not unusual, then nearly every middle-class American today is richer than was America’s richest man a mere 100 years ago.

Read it. And watch the video.

‘Hey, lady, can your dog come out and play?’

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A town in the US state of Colorado has been left without any police after the entire department quit in one day.

The resignation of police marshal Tim Bradley prompted the town’s three other volunteer officers to do the same – leaving nearby El Paso County and Teller County sheriff’s offices to look after the town of Green Mountain Falls.

Residents were apparently offered no explanation for the sudden departure of their police force, although Fox News reported an anonymous source as saying the police were unhappy with the newly elected mayor Jane Newberry. Their resignations happened just a day before she took office.

I don’t want to seem insensitive, but this strikes me as very American.

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In recent years, people moving to Texas from other states — rather than from other countries — have played a key role in the state’s population growth, according to a new analysis by the Office of the State Demographer. From 2005 to 2013, an estimated 5.9 million people moved to Texas, and 4.8 million of those came from one of the other 49 states.

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Tubman, who will replace President Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill, is most known to Americans for leading hundreds of slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad. But she also played a crucial and pioneering role in the Civil War.

In addition to being the first woman in U.S. history to lead a military expedition, Tubman—whom John Brown called “General Tubman”—was a Union army spy and recruiter.

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A 44-year-old woman accused of fabricating a rape claim was recently ordered to serve two years of probation and complete 100 hours of community service.  Prosecutors say data pulled from her Fitbit wristband provided them with crucial evidence contradicting her claims.

Oops.

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You really have to work in IT to get full value from these but they ought to be sufficiently funny for everybody to enjoy.

My favorite:

Tariff policy beneficiaries are always seen, but its victims are mostly unseen. Politicians love this. The reason is simple. The beneficiaries know for whom to cast their ballots and to whom to give campaign contributions. Most often, the victims do not know whom to blame for their calamity.

A birthday appreciation from a colleague here.

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What’s the connection between the Beatles’ George Harrison, boxing legend Muhammad Ali, and Chrysler cars? The Highway Hi-Fi: a vinyl record player that just happened to be the world’s first in-car music system. It appeared 60 years ago this spring, in 1956, and should have been a smash hit. It was innovatory, a major talking point, arrived as the car market was booming as never before, and it came with much press hype. It also had the backing of a leading motor manufacturer. What could possibly go wrong?

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This just looks way cool. This is Captain Nemo’s other ride.

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Because we all need a break from Donald Trump.

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I am not making this up.

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Apparently an art project.

Welcome Back My Friends

RIP Keith Emerson.

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Amity Shlaes clues you in.

My kind of a President.

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Pretty cute.

‘Muffy, meet Adolf. Adolf, eat Muffy.’

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Pour molten aluminum into an anthill, sell the result as art.

I am not making this up.

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On a late Monday morning in this rural New Hampshire town, Dayna and Joe Martin’s four children are all home. Devin, age 16, is hammering a piece of steel in the blacksmith forge he and his parents built out of a storage shed in the backyard. Tiffany, 14, is twirling on a hoverboard, deftly avoiding the kaleidoscope-painted cabinets in the old farmhouse’s living room. Ivy, 10, and Orion, 7, are sitting next to each other using the family’s two computers, clicking through an intense session of Minecraft.

It looks a lot like school vacation, or a weekend. But it’s not. This, for the Martin kids, is school. Or, to put it more accurately, it’s their version of “unschooling,” an educational theory that suggests children should follow their own interests, without the imposition of school or even any alternative educational curriculum, because this is the best way for them to learn and grow.

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A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit said the state’s prohibition on what the court called “the vast majority of semi-automatic rifles commonly kept by several million American citizens” amounted to a violation of their rights under the Constitution.

“In our view, Maryland law implicates the core protection of the Second Amendment — the right of law-abiding responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home,” Chief Judge William Traxler wrote in the divided ruling.

Provisions that outlaw these firearms, Traxler wrote, “substantially burden this fundamental right.”

Of course, ‘assault weapon’ is just a scare-word invented by gun-grabbers because it sounds scary and ‘assault rifle’ has a technical meaning that they can’t wiggle around.

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So should any right-minded individual, even though Google did their best to disguise the fact that he was black. Rather than whine about his hard life, Douglass got out there and busted his ass getting the job done. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, take note.

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Good to know that the Real America is still out there.

Read it. And for God’s sake watch the video.

That’s entertainment.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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“The Tomb Guards maintain a constant vigil at the Tomb no matter the weather conditions,” states the group’s Facebook page.Members of the 3d U.S. Infantry Regiment, also known as “The Old Guard” are staying with the Tomb of the Unknown Solider at Arlington National Cemetery despite blizzard conditions slamming the area.

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Biologist Josiah Zayner, founder of the Open Discovery Institute (ODIN), is now offering kits via Indiegogo that enables DIY gene-editing of single-celled critters in the comfort of your own home. From the San Jose Mercury News:

Be the first on your block to start the Zombie Apocalypse.

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Robots may not stop war, but they may someday be able to save the humans fighting it. Developed by Tactical Robotics, the Air Mule is a hovercar-like aircraft, built to be an ambulance. On December 30th, it flew autonomously, giving a wobbly glimpse at what battlefield salvation may look like later this century.

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Americans for Tax Reform once again presents a series of handy Bingo cards you may use to check off terms and phrases likely to be used during President Obama’s (FINAL!) State of the Union address on Tuesday.

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By now some of you are tut-tutting: Really, a drip coffeemaker? In 2016? If you want a really good cup of coffee, you need a cold French press and Jamaican beans individually washed in melted glacier runoff and hand-ground by pressing them between pieces of Icelandic volcano pumice. If you are that person, I like to imagine you’ve been kidnapped and trussed by Liam Neeson, who sits across from you, straddling a chair and saying, “I’m going to sit here with this 24-ounce of SuperAmerica coffee until you beg for it. The longer you wait, the colder it gets. Did I mention it’s that nasty hazelnut blend?”

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Sparky is now 11 and weighs 1,600 pounds, walking with a limp, according to an announcement made today by the USFWS.

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Aktarer Zaman, now 23, didn’t back down when United Airlines (UAL) and Orbitz sued him a little over a year ago for opening a website called Skiplagged.com to help travelers find cheap plane tickets.

Sounds to me like a useful service. Typically, when airlines discount seats it’s because people aren’t buying them, so he’s helping them fill up their planes.

United and Orbitz were livid about Skiplagged, calling the start up website “unfair competition” that promoted “strictly prohibited” travel. They filed a federal lawsuit and demanded Zaman pay them $75,000 in lost revenue.

If it was ‘strictly prohibited’, then how were they able to get the tickets? I smell a rat.

Skiplagged helps travelers find cheap tickets through a strategy called “hidden city” ticketing.

The idea is that you buy an airline ticket that has a layover at your actual destination.

Say you want to fly from New York to San Francisco. You book a flight from New York to Portland with a layover in San Francisco and get off there, without bothering to take the last leg of the flight. Sometimes, that can save you money. Flying this way isn’t always cheapest, but it often is.

Apparently the airline created its own problem. If they want to prevent that sort of thing, they need to adjust their pricing, not sue the guy who is taking advantage of the system that they set up.

Zaman says he and his lawyers realized early on that United’s case was flawed. United claimed Zaman broke the “contract of carriage,” but that’s a contract between passengers and airlines — not third parties like Skiplagged.

You’d think that their lawyers would have realized that. Figuring out who is bound by a contract is something they teach first semester at law school.

“I’m just providing people with information and making them more informed,” he said. “I never saw that as a bad thing, making people be more skilled travelers.”

And indeed it is not a bad thing, but rather a good thing. Access to information is one of the chief ways individual consumers can reverse the ancient advantage that vendors have in any market. This guy ought to get some sort of award.

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Is it just me, or is there something very American about this?

Glenn Harlan Reyholds (“Instapundit”) has an answer.

In my hometown of Knoxville, Tenn., a 15-year-old became a hero the week before Christmas.

Zaevion Dobson, a football player at Fulton High School, threw himself on top of three girls as gang members released a hail of bullets in an apparently random retaliation for a shooting the day before. Zaevion traded his life for the girls’ safety; he died after being struck by a bullet.

Here’s a case where black lives really do matter — this kid gave his life to protect others. That’s what being a hero is all about.

Dobson’s heroism speaks well of his family and his community. Football encourages quick-thinking physicality, but how people react in that split second is a reflection of the values they’ve absorbed over a lifetime. Greater love hath no man, we are told by the Bible, than that he lay down his life for his friends.

We’d like to live in a world where such heroic tendencies are common, but if they were common, then they wouldn’t be heroic, would they? But surely, we’d like to live in a world where selfless heroism is more common.

We would indeed.