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With the demise of The Weekly Standard solidified Friday, the United Kingdom-based Spectator is hoping to take its place as the preeminent right-leaning journal unwedded to any particular Republican politician by launching an American print edition in 2019, The Daily Caller News Foundation learned.

I may have to subscribe.

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It worked for me, rapidly enough that I could just maintain a normal walking pace past the camera console. It printed out my name and seat assignment as I walked past.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Just waiting for CNN to blame it on Donald Trump….

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The decision Friday finding the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional comes at the tail end of a six-week open enrollment period for the program in 2019 and underscores a divide between Republicans who have long sought to invalidate the law and Democrats who fought to keep it in place.

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Texas and an alliance of 19 states argued to the judge that they’ve been harmed by an increase in the number of people on state-supported insurance rolls. They claimed that when Congress last year repealed the tax penalty for the so-called individual mandate, it eliminated the U.S. Supreme Court’s rationale for finding the ACA constitutional in 2012.

The Texas judge agreed. He likened the debate over which provisions of the law should stand or fail to “watching a slow game of Jenga, each party poking at a different provision to see if the ACA falls.” He also wrote that it’s clear the individual mandate is the linchpin of the law “without marching through every nook and cranny of the ACA’s 900-plus pages.”

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In what is believed to be a legal first, a fingerprint “lifted” from a mobile phone video helped bring the girl’s killer to justice. Officers spotted a recognisable print in a mobile phone film showing Viktorija’s murderer scrolling through his iPhone as he tried to delete evidence.

The footage did not show the boy’s face, meaning a fingerprint was the only means of proving he was using the phone.

We have the technology.

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Honestly? More than I care to.

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Black population loss in Chicago is substantial but has received scant attention. In the city alone the black population has dropped 8.9% since 2010, and almost 25% since 2000. Blacks were once the largest racial/ethnic group in Chicago, but are now second behind whites; blacks are close to being surpassed by Latinos. In the entire metro area, black population is down about 5%.

Considering the rate of black-on-black crime, which never makes it to the DemLegHump Media because it isn’t really news, one can hardly blame them.

The Antiplanner is on the case.

Early signs indicate at least some housing markets are cooling off. Homes for sale in Seattle aren’t seeing as much intense bidding as a few months ago. Bidding wars are also becoming rare in Portland. The Case-Shiller index says that markets are weakening in other regions as well.

The problem with the housing market is that housing costs are too high in many markets for non-rich people to find accommodation, and yet housing prices can’t come down without a lot of economic Bad Stuff happening. It’s like inflation: Inflation is a bad thing but once it happens you’re kinda stuck with it because reversing it, deflation, is even worse.

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What a novel innovation — although I swear I’ve heard that somewhere before.

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Senan Molony is a journalist in Ireland who has been studying the Titanic for over 30 years. He recently came across an amazing discovery hidden in an attic in England. This hidden gem was pictures taken of the Titanic by the ship-building firm before it left the shipyard. One of these amazing pictures shows a 30 foot long dark marking on the hull, right where the iceberg was known to have struck the ship. This mark was judged by engineers at the Imperial College of London to be caused by the coal fire that took place in the three story-high coal bunker on the ship.

The fact that a coal fire was going on aboard is well documented. During the inquiry after the sinking, Charles Hendrickson was brought up to testify and talked about the fire. He mentioned that the fire was known of before the Titanic left Belfast and Hendrickson and three to four other men worked to put out the fire. The only way to put out a coal fire in a bunker like this, was to put the burning coal into ship’s furnace.

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The Wednesday report comes in the wake of sinking membership and multiple controversies surrounding the 108-year-old organization, including sex abuse allegations and its controversial decision to change its program name from Boy Scouts to Scouts BSA and allow girls into that program.

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As the organization has made decisions deemed to be more inclusive, such as allowing openly gay scouts in 2013 and scoutmasters in 2015 as well as the 2018 decision to allow girls, membership has continued to decline sharply, from over 4 million members at its peak to a claimed 2.3 million members at present.

Saw that coming.

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After an unexpected surge of new users caused some technical difficulties earlier in the week, the new app that some are calling the answer to the ongoing battle between conservatives and Twitter is back up and running, promising to support free expression online.

The platform, called Parler News, is named for the French word meaning “to speak,” and many are saying it is the next logical move for those who wish to do so freely without fear of being silenced.

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The structure of the app itself closely mirrors that of Twitter, limiting the learning curve for those who choose to make the jump. User posts are limited to 1,000 characters, which other users can then support by “voting” and “echoing,” rather than “liking” and “retweeting.”

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He was such a good boy.

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I blame Global Warming climate change.

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Guess I need to check out their menu more often.

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But you knew that.

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Researchers have used a neural network to generate artificial fingerprints that work as a “master key” for biometric identification systems and prove fake fingerprints can be created.

According to a paper presented at a security conference in Los Angeles, the artificially generated fingerprints, dubbed “DeepMasterPrints” by the researchers from New York University, were able to imitate more than one in five fingerprints in a biometric system that should only have an error rate of one in a thousand.

How soon before they can do that with retinas?

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

I have always marveled at the weight given to fingerprint identification, although so far as I am aware there is no real science behind it.

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Professor O’Mullane said the new composite material he and PhD student Ummul Sultana had developed enabled electrochemical water splitting into hydrogen and oxygen using cheap and readily available elements as catalysts.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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President Donald Trump is expected to name current State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert the next ambassador to the United Nations on Friday, according to multiple outlets.

Nauert would be replacing outgoing ambassador Nikki Haley who announced her resignation back in October, Fox News reported. Nauert was named as one of Trump’s top candidates for the vacancy in the days after Haley’s resignation became public.

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Much of the attention the Minerva Project received around its much-watched launch in 2012 focused on the start-up’s lofty goal of creating an elite “Ivy League 2.0” university, with top traditional-age students doing immersive stints at campus locations around the world while also taking online courses.

But Minerva’s biggest success so far is its curriculum, which the university describes as a systematic rethinking of the liberal arts. The nonbuzzy approach hearkens back to higher education’s roots with a focus on practical, vocational knowledge, and is drawing attention from both traditional academics and would-be disrupters.

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Advocates of open borders quoted in media coverage of the migrant “caravan” moving north through Mexico are part of a network of U.S.-based groups funded in the past by left-leaning foundations, according to tax and financial records.

Pueblo Sin Fronteras, a Chicago-based nonprofit whose name means People Without Borders, is widely credited with organizing the caravans of migrants that traveled from Central America on trains and buses and on foot this year and last.

Two United Methodist churches in Chicago appear to be bases for People Without Borders, which is led by one of the pastors, documents show.

Several organizations are “consistently connected on various websites” and “have overlapping people, most notably Emma Lozano,” said Hayden Ludwig, a research analyst at Washington-based Capital Research Center, naming the Chicago pastor.

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Sounds about right.

Seems as if they’re catching on.

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The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

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I enjoy cross-sections. Perhaps you do too.

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This guy looks like a derelict ex-biker, not the Aquaman I grew up with.

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My, what a surprise.

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The Task Force’s main line of effort is devoted to recruiting, selecting, training and acculturating superior infantrymen. We can’t go back to the days of “Willie and Joe,” the iconic World War II caricatures of poorly-treated and poorly trained doughboys. From now on, infantry will be treated as an “excepted” category, a force set apart from other arms and the usual personnel bureaucracy. Initiatives the Task Force has launched or is considering include a new system for evaluating recruits for the special attributes of close combat soldiers; increasing the time leaders spend in a specific small unit before being reassigned; adding additional professional schooling for small unit noncommissioned officers; extending the training time for new recruits; selective bonuses and incentives to serve in the close combat branches and policies that exempt close combat units from the distractions of non infantry duties.

I have a copy of the author’s book Scales On War. Highly recommended, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

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Waiting for Trump to slap a huge tariff on them….

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Well, that didn’t last long.

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Goats get all the best stuff.

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In a paper out today in Nature, MIT researchers report that they have created and flown the first plane that doesn’t require any moving parts. This 2.45-kilogram (5.4-pound) experimental aircraft did not spin turbine blades to propel itself 60 meters (200 feet, the length of a school gym): it used electricity directly.

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Can’t say that I blame them.

UPDATE:

Kind of awesome, really.

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

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‘The Democrats are revolting!’

‘They certainly are….’

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I hadn’t heard that she’d resigned. Nor have I seen it in the news. Have you?

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

Mission Accomplished.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people, I’m tellin’ ya.

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Give them your zip code and they’ll tell you what’s ‘in season’ in your area.

Great for those of us who like eating like our ancestors — and getting a good price.

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Well, we have something to look forward to — two Amazon rivers in the same hemisphere.

Perhaps Jeff can find some stilts long enough to save his HQ.

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Sounds uncomfortable.

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PERTH-based Fastbrick Robotics has achieved what it says is a world-first with the fully automated construction of a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in less than three days.

The ASX-listed company says civil and structural engineers verified that the structure — completed on Monday in WA by a robotic arm from a 3D model — met relevant building standards, setting the stage for commercialisation of the product.

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Sheep get fleeced. An eternal truth.

I’m sure Jeff Bezos is smiling. Being a rich Democrat is a pretty sweet gig. Ask any Kennedy.

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Sounds like a great idea.

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In late 2018 China announced that its new Z-10 helicopter gunship was being equipped with lightweight graphene (a form of carbon that is extremely thin, strong and cheap) armor. That would make the Chinese the first to make available graphene armor for military applications. Work on this sort of thing has been going on for over a decade with the major problem being developing a cheap and reliable manufacturing process for sheets of this ultrathin graphene. China released few details on its military grade graphene armor other than that it was rigid and lightweight.

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Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming is poised to win the GOP leadership election on Wednesday to become the party’s third-ranking member as the Republican conference chair.

Cheney is running unopposed following GOP Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers’s decision not to re-run for the seat. Consequently, the Wyoming congresswoman will be the only female in the party to hold a leadership position.

This could get interesting.

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The latest op-ed from the popular German columnist Hans Heckel concerns the growing ranks of countries that are refusing to sign the UN’s migration pact (Bulgaria declared against it today, if I’m not mistaken).

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Think about that for a bit.

UPDATE: Destruction of evidence charges filed for remotely wiping iPhone