Read it.

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

Makes you wonder what the Inca were up to, though, doesn’t it?

Read it.

Check it out.

This is, of course, all leading up to International Talk Like a Pirate Day, September 19th.

Read it.

Toast is a near-universally popular snack because it reminds us of happy childhood memories, scientists have found.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

What would we do without scientists?

An Admirable Sentiment.

Never forget what happened. Never forget who did it. Never forget that it wasn’t their first attempt. Never believe that it won’t be their last.

And that says all that needs to be said on the subject.

Read it.

And about time, too.

Mark Levin creeps me out; he’s not quite in Michael Savage territory, but he still rubs me the wrong way. Right now he appears to be in a pissing contest with the guys at Powerline that seems to have started with the Maryland Republican Senate primary race.

Read it. And watch the videos. And remember.

Read it.

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

Bats can be identified by their different regional dialects, researchers in Australia have discovered.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees.

Gotta love Australians.

Read it.

The Vatican Library is to reopen to scholars after a three year, £7.5 million renovation, with 21st century technology enlisted to safeguard books and manuscripts dating back nearly 2,000 years.

Read it.

A Roman bronze helmet complete with face-mask – thought to be one of only three of its kind to be found in Britain – has been discovered by a metal detector enthusiast in Cumbria.

Read it.

At a faculty lunch yesterday, I heard about an ingenious scheme used by some universities in New York, where much rental housing is rent controlled.  Here are the three key elements, as it was described to me by one of my colleagues:

1. The university buys a rent-controlled building.  The purchase price is low, because the existing landlord cannot make much money renting it.

2. The university then rents the apartments to its own senior faculty, who view this as a great perk.  In essence, the difference between the free-market rent and the controlled rent is a form of compensation for the professor.  As a result, the university can reduce the professor’s cash compensation by an equivalent amount.  The university is effectively earning the market rent for the apartment.

3. But it gets even better.  The implicit rental subsidy is a form of non-taxed compensation.  Normally, if an employer gives an employee a perk like this, the subsidy is taxable income (unless the perk is deemed a working condition required to do the job, like a hotel manager living in a hotel).  But here, the university can claim there is no subsidy: It is only charging what the rent-control law requires.  Because of this tax treatment, the implicit subsidy is worth even more to the professor than the equivalent cash compensation.  This fact allows the university to reduce the professor’s cash compensation by an even greater amount.  Thus, the university effectively earns even more than the free-market rent on a real estate investment purchased much lower than the free-market price would have been.

The Crust takes care of its own.

Read it.

It gets better:

The Quran doesn’t just preach religious tolerance; the Prophet Muhammad demonstrated it in his life, [Emad El-Din Shahin, a religion professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana] says.

The prophet would meet Christian delegations in his mosque.

“He would allow them to perform Christian prayers in the mosque,” Shahin says.

First Things’ Joe Carter has a relevant question: “Why would Christians need to pray in a mosque? Why don’t they just go to First Baptist of Mecca or St. Paul’s in Medina. Oh yeah, that’s right. Because there are no official churches in Saudi Arabia of any Christian denomination.” I mean, how — in a story such as this — do you not mention these basic facts about how Christianity is actually treated in Saudi Arabia? It’s just journalistic malpractice. One almost gets the feeling that mainstream reporters are just expressing their hopes and wishes in stories about religious tolerance in Islam. We’re certainly not concerned about accuracy, if stories such as this are any guide.

So if you think about the current global situation when it comes to religious freedom, who matches this better? Is it — as CNN writes — the pastor of a 50-person congregation in Florida? Or do you think we should consider other small and inconsequential groups, such as the entire nation of Saudi Arabia?

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I suspect that they don’t; they just find it a useful stick with which to beat their opponents in light of the fact that they’ve successfully convinced NAMs of the myth.

Plus there’s the standard liberal meme of ‘We’re not racist. They’re not us. Therefore they must be racist.’ that crops up wherever politically fashionable thought abounds.

I suspect that a large part of it is the conflation of ‘conservatism’ as a temperament with ‘conservatism’ as a political program; Southern Democrats who backed the Jim Crow laws were ‘conservative’ in temperament in the sense that they liked the system they had and didn’t want it to change, and the distinction between the two has been blurred by ‘progressives’ (whether deliberately or not) in order to tar the latter with the alleged faults of the former.

Read it.

Do not be surprised if electric cars do not follow the trajectory of personal computers and mobile phones. Leaving aside the prohibitive prices, the infrastructure needed to support wide-scale use of electric cars is nonexistent. How readily will the requisite millions of batteries be available when manufacturers are quick to unveil new, bold electric car plans but slow to commit to massive battery orders? And how will people in large cities, where 30 to 60 percent of cars are parked curbside, charge their vehicles? Mass construction of charging stations must precede mass ownership of electrics outside of the suburbs, where vehicles could be charged in garages. This is why researchers at IHS Global Insight put the share of pure electrics at just 0.6 percent of world sales in 2020, and why any claim that electric cars will soon take over the market is utterly unrealistic.

Read it.

“How many people really believe that Kandahar is central to Western civilisation. We did not got to Afghanistan to control Kandahar ,” he said.

“Our preference at the time of the attack was for the Taliban to give up al Qaeda not to change the regime. Mr Obama himself and the administration say what we are trying to do in Afghanistan is to destroy al Qaeda.”

Alongside misdirected strategy, the “utter corruption” of the government of President Hamid Karzai had eclipsed Nato’s hopes to keeping the Taliban at bay after its defeat in late 2001.

Works for me.

The Ochlophobist is not impressed.

What was of interest to me was that the newsmongers interviewed a number of late middle aged to elderly women who were quite evidently of the UCC / Unitarian spectrum – they spoke using the usual liberal end of Mainline Prot rhetoric and mannerisms. And yet they were all wearing head-coverings and there was video footage of them sitting in the back of the mosque with the other women during the ceremony.

It struck me that if these women are like 99.9% of the other women from the religious “traditional sphere” these women appear to come from, they would be downright pissed and beligerant if they were asked to cover their heads and sit in the back of a Christian church of any sort – especially a Christian church that does not ordain women in something of the same manner that we know this Muslim community is not going to have a woman as imam.

Read it.

The fundamental problem with the VAT is political — or more precisely, a public choice problem rather than a fiscal economics one.  The hidden nature of the VAT makes it a politically feasible way to creep up tax revenues, because of the fact of rational political ignorance on the part of voters, and public choice incentives on the part of politicians to increase government and the concomitant revenues to fund it.  This is a slightly different point than Mitchell makes in his piece; Mitchell focuses on more revenue streams available eventually equals government to match, as Friedman argued.  But the specific argument against the VAT is the politically hidden nature of the tax, because it is imposed at each stage of value-added, but then is no longer visible to the end user as a tax, but merely as part of the “cost.”  If you’re a voter, that should be a bug, not a feature.  If you’re a member of the political class, so to speak, it is much more likely to be regarded the other way around.

Read it.

For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, American liberals distinguished themselves from conservatives by what Lionel Trilling called “a spiritual orthodoxy of belief in progress.” Liberalism placed its hopes in human perfectibility. Regarding human nature as essentially both beneficent and malleable, liberals, like their socialist cousins, argued that with the aid of science and given the proper social and economic conditions, humanity could free itself from its cramped carapace of greed and distrust and enter a realm of true freedom and happiness. Conservatives, by contrast, clung to a tragic sense of man’s inherent limitations. While acknowledging the benefits of science, they argued that it could never fundamentally reform, let alone transcend, the human condition. Most problems don’t have a solution, the conservatives maintained; rather than attempting Promethean feats, man would do best to find a balanced place in the world.

Why, then, did American liberalism, starting in the early 1970s, undergo a historic metanoia, dismissing the idea of progress just as progress was being won? Multiple political and economic forces paved liberalism’s path away from its mid-century optimism and toward an aristocratic outlook reminiscent of the Tory Radicalism of nineteenth-century Britain; but one of the most powerful was the rise of the modern environmental movement and its recurrent hysterias.

If one were to pick a point at which liberalism’s extraordinary reversal began, it might be the celebration of the first Earth Day, in April 1970.

Like the Tory Radicals, today’s liberal gentry see the untamed middle classes as the true enemy. “Environmentalism offered the extraordinary opportunity to combine the qualities of virtue and selfishness,” wrote William Tucker in a groundbreaking 1977 Harper’s article on the opposition to construction of the Storm King power plant along New York’s Hudson River. Tucker described the extraordinary sight of a fleet of yachts—including one piloted by the old Stalinist singer Pete Seeger—sailing up and down the Hudson in protest. What Tucker tellingly described as the environmentalists’ “aristocratic” vision called for a stratified, terraced society in which the knowing ones would order society for the rest of us. Touring American campuses in the mid-1970s, Norman Macrae of The Economist was shocked “to hear so many supposedly left-wing young Americans who still thought they were expressing an entirely new and progressive philosophy as they mouthed the same prejudices as Trollope’s 19th century Tory squires: attacking any further expansion of industry and commerce as impossibly vulgar, because ecologically unfair to their pheasants and wild ducks.”

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The surest sign that a market is free is that it is competitive; there should be a rich variety of products provided by a vast number of firms, a situation which affords entrepreneurs many opportunities to enter the market and workers many places to sell their labor. And when we waltz into our local Wal Mart, that is what we seem to see. Alas, it is an illusion of competition rather than the reality. For example, if you want eyeglasses, you can go to Pearl Vision, or Lenscrafters, Sears Optical, JC Penney, Target, Macy’s, Sunglass Hut, or buy frames from 25 different manufacturers. Surely choice and competition prevail in this market. But no. All of these are one company, the Italian conglomerate Luxottica. And as with glasses, so also with so many other products. Most of our beer—even some that try to pass themselves off as “craft” beer—is provided by just two companies, ImBev of Belgium or the South African Brewing Company. Proctor & Gamble provides 75% of razors, 60% of detergent, 50% of feminine pads, etc. Even what few companies remain in each market often engage in collusion rather than competition. Wal Mart, for example, appoints one company as a “category manager” to allocate shelf space for all the “competing” companies.

Janet Daley at the Telegraph understands America better than most.

Check It Out.

The calligraphy is pretty cool, too.

Read it.

Now watch the government sit on it for a decade or two.

Read it.

Home Owners’ Associations are living proof that Americans can be as fascist as anybody when they’re inclined to be.

Like much in contemporary American politics, this leaves me confused. I don’t understand why an exclusive residential association, freely entered into, with explicit rules that are presented at the outset, offering services-for-cash, is un-American. After all, this is in contrast to a municipality that levies taxes for services from which one cannot opt out (if one has no children in the schools, for instance) and which may not be available to all (such as public transport), and which could easily be seen as a redistributive institution, an example of that socialism we keep hearing so much about.

That’s because you’re dimwitted. The HOA agreement is usually mandatory for a particular neighborhood, and if you want to live there you have to join and pay — not unlike a municipality. And the actions of HOAs aren’t subject to the normal political processes or safeguards — quite unlike legitimate political entities. Many times their oppressive nature isn’t apparent until one is already stuck; and with the housing market the way it is, there is no easy way to escape.

The Ochlophobist reflects on the current scene.

I have burned a lot of books in my day. It was a ritual at a former workplace of mine. We burned some old, beat up Qur’ans we didn’t think would ever sell, but, for the sake of fairness of course, we also burned translations of the Bible that we didn’t like and everything that Matthew Fox ever wrote and pretty much every work of pop spirituality that was published in English in the 90s. Burning books is fun, shooting them is funer, and blowing them up is funest. But since becoming Orthodox, a religion which burns holy things which are no longer usable, such as damaged icons, etc., it seems that burning as an act of dissent is not as fun as it used to be. Perhaps they could put a Qur’an into a jar of urine. No, wait, that is what Americans from blue states call art, and Muslims who know that our federal government occasionally pays to have Christian symbols thus treated might then think that Islam has finally made it as an accepted American religion, and I don’t think that is the purpose behind what had been planned for a Florida campfire tomorrow. We live in confusing times.

Read it.

The family of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has been linked to more than a dozen expensive homes in the Gulf, raising fears that Western aid money sent to Afghanistan is being misused.

Oh, ya think?

Read it.

I can vouch for it.

Read it.

Yet another excellent reason to avoid Facebook.

The more other people know about you, the worse off you are. Trust me on this. (Or don’t. You’ll learn.)

Read it.

And, of course, if you don’t own it, then you didn’t buy it; you merely paid for it. Rather like the government in that respect.

Read it.

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

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Uh-oh. It’s a white male. How did that happen?

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Federal employees wouldn’t skip out on their taxes, would they?

Read it.

Quicksand once offered filmmakers a simple recipe for excitement: A pool of water, thickened with oatmeal, sprinkled over the top with wine corks. It was, in its purest form, a plot device unburdened by character, motivation, or story: My god, we’re sinking! Will we escape this life-threatening situation before time runs out? Those who weren’t rescued simply vanished from the script: It’s too late—he’s gone.

Proof positive that Slate isn’t inhabited solely by humorless leftist tools.

(Or maybe it is, but they occasionally take drugs.)

Read it.

A recent addition to the autopsy workflow is the possibility of conducting postmortem imaging — in its 3D version, also called virtual autopsy (VA) — using MDCT or MRI data from scans of cadavers and with direct volume rendering (DVR) 3D techniques. At the foundation of the VA development are the modern imaging modalities that can generate large, high-quality datasets with submillimeter precision. Interactive visualization of these 3D datasets can provide valuable insight into the corpses and enables noninvasive diagnostic procedures. Efficient handling and analysis of the datasets is, however, problematic. For instance, in postmortem CT imaging, not being limited by a certain radiation dose per patient means the datasets can be generated with such a high resolution that they become difficult to handle in today’s archive retrieval and interactive visualization systems, specifically in the case of full body scans.

Read it.

David Friedman looks at manners.

My objective is to get him to go back to the end of the line, getting me through a little faster, and to do it with a minimum of unpleasantness. By treating his act as a mistake I lower the cost to him of doing what I want, since doing so does not require him to implicitly confess a deliberate violation of local norms. Lowering the cost to him of doing what I want makes him more likely to do it. What my friend regarded as behavior due to courtesy appears to me as a simple application of economics.

An Amusing Cartoon.

Although not, unfortunately, of Mohammed.

It does, however, tell you pretty much all you need to know about Islam.

Read it.

Oh, yeah, that’ll work.

Tom Smith puts the boot in.

It’s a perfectly obvious point, but perhaps still worth making.  When the government does not tax some income of a very rich person, that is not a “giveaway”.  That is the government not taking some money that was earned by some rich person.  Some people have a lot of money.  When you take their money from them, it is their money you are taking.  Indeed, this is what thousands of pages of tax law goes to determine:  Is it income?  Is it your income?  If it is neither yours nor income then it won’t be taxed as part of your income tax.  It is the most annoying thing tax people do — referring to income the government does not take from you as something it has given to you.

However little the rich may deserve their wealth, the government deserves it even less.

Eric Raymond spills his guts.

Ah, but then came the deadly disclaimers. “VEGAN GLUTEN-FREE NO GMOs NO TRANS FAT.” and “We support local and fair-trade sources growing certified organic, transitional, and pesticide-free products.” Aaaarrrgggh! Suddenly my lovely potential snack was covered with an evil-smelling miasma of diet-faddery, sanctimony, political correctness, and just plain nonsense. This, I find, is a chronic problem with buying “organic”.

The problem is, every time I buy “organic”, I feel like I’m sending a reinforcement to several different forms of vicious stupidity, beginning with the term “organic” itself. Duh! Actually, all food is “organic”; the term just means “chemistry based on carbon chains”.

Read it.

For a month, the Muslims have alternately starved and gorged to the point of throwing up, and at least in the second case received demonstrative visits from German VIPs. At the end of the Ramadan bulimia month, the Muslims demonstrate once more the beauty of their peaceful “religion” at “Al Quds Day” in Berlin. Al Quds stands for the Muslim dream of a Jew-free Jerusalem, after completion of the Holocaust. The Nazi salute is de rigueur.

Read it.

Ah, the perils of treating politics as a substitute for religion. George W. Bush never had that problem; nobody really came to politics for the first time in 2000 because they thought voting for Bush would make them feel personally fulfilled, would end politics as we have known it, would end the nation’s racial divisions and make the world love us, or that he would pay their mortgage and car payments. Bush got elected because he seemed like a guy who could be trusted to do the job. And of course, that’s before you get to Obama’s actual job performance….

Read it.

It could happen.

Read it.

A Chinese woman is suing a cinema and a film’s distributors for wasting her time by showing 20 minutes of adverts before it started, according to state media.

What an excellent idea.

Moe Lane kicks over a rock.

The scheme goes like this: Maxine Waters (D, CA-35) regularly puts out a mailer to LA residents with her sample ballot recommendations.  To get on it, you have to pay out money to ‘cover the costs.’ It’s described as ‘reimbursement’ rather than ‘payment’ because that way there’s no federal campaign funding restrictions, which effectively means that candidates and groups can be charged as much money as Rep. Waters likes.  And a third of that money ends up getting funneled into a PR firm owned by Waters’ daughter – and before you object: the article linked above notes that the firm’s “fees do not include expenses for printing and mailing, which are paid separately by the committee.”

And here’s the kicker: that payola’s all perfectly legal, mind you.  Rep. Waters has worked out a method where she can sell her patronage to other Democrats and funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars to her family, and the FEC can’t touch her for it (it’s also not part of her ethics investigation).

Read it.

In the culture at large, there is something of an obsession with learning the sex of babies in the womb, a fascination that can get pretty creepy and overdone. Some parents are having what they call “sex parties,” where they reveal the sex of their baby in some cutesy way. Websites offer reams of advice on how to make “creative gender announcements” (like getting the tell-tale sonogram put onto t-shirts and sent to friends as a gift, or having “It’s going to be a [Whatever]!” proclaimed on the JumboTron at a major sports event).

Read it.

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

Read it.

Another very good reason to avoid Twitter and the twits who inhabit it.

Never was there a business more aptly named.

Read it.

Hey, that’s what I pay them for.

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For nearly two years, Amazon has been trying to get manufacturers to adopt “frustration-free packaging” that gets rid of plastic cases and air-bubble wrap — major irritants for consumers and one of Amazon’s biggest sources of customer complaints.

But the frustration persists. Only about 600 of the millions of products Amazon sells come in frustration-free versions. And other big online retailers, like Walmart.com and Target.com, have not embraced the new packaging, even when manufacturers make it available.