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The Rev. Gabe Sylvia told The Charlotte Observer the two sons of Jeremy and Jodi Stokes can join the scouting program at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews. He said the parents are also welcome to become volunteers but cannot function as leaders even though Jeremy Stokes is an Eagle Scout.

“Based on a once-over, informal scan, it looked like the Stokes would be good additions to our leadership,” he said. “But when it became clear that they were Mormons, they could not become leaders in our pack. Mormonism is not consistent with historical Christianity.”

The irony of some do-it-yourself Protestant church calling some other group ‘not consistent with historical Christianity’ is fairly obvious.

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Mike Masnik touts this as the most entertaining explanation of abundance and scarcity in this modern world Ever, and I would not doubt his word.

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Send ’em over to join the polar bears. Or use them for food – I’m told bear tastes pretty good, although (like pork) you have to be sure you cook it long enough.

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The Maori language is in danger of dying out because of neglect by successive New Zealand governments, a new report has claimed.

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Instapundit passes along an excellent point from one of his readers: the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy has been ordered suspended, via judicial fiat.  The military has complied with the court order, although they strongly disagree with it: there is a moratorium on enforcing DADT, and openly gay soldiers may serve.  Whether you are happy with this development or not*, there is one detail about this which is kind of important: the stated reason Ivy League colleges typically give for forbidding ROTC programs on campus has just gone away.  The military just stopped discharging openly gay soldiers.  It’s over.  The Ivy League won.

As one of the many people who attempted to get ROTC back at Yale, I’m not holding my breath–homosexuality is only one of the reasons, although perhaps the most obvious one, why ROTC was excluded from the Crustian training grounds. But this can certainly be used to embarrass the Drones In Charge about it, which is always entertaining.

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Libraries have always dealt with the business world, buying books, journals, and other products. In the past, however, libraries separated the commercial process of acquiring materials from the academic objective of putting those materials to use. But that division has now faded as an unintended side effect of information technology.

Commercialization has impinged on two core facets of university libraries—their collections and their user services. The ownership and provision of research materials, especially academic journals, has been increasingly outsourced to for-profit companies. Library patrons, moreover, are increasingly regarded simply as consumers, transforming user services into customer service. Both developments have distanced libraries from their academic missions.

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Apparently it doesn’t help.

“The screen won’t go blank,” said Faton Begolli, a sophomore from Boston. “There can’t be a virus. It wouldn’t be the same without books. They’ve defined ‘academia’ for a thousand years.”

Actually, we’ve only had textbooks for less than half that. The original purpose of a college lecture was so that students could make (from dictation) their own copies of the materials that the teacher was using. (Easily done with Peter Lombard’s Sententiae; differential calculus, not so much.)

So much for the collegiate learning experience.

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You can build a mainframe from the things you have at home.

“The 747 represented the single largest industrial achievement in modern history and its abandonment in the deserts make a statement about the obsolescence and ephemeral nature of our technology and our society,” the David Hertz website states. “As a structure and engineering achievement, the aircraft encloses a lot of space using the least amount of materials in a very resourceful and efficient manner. The recycling of the 4.5 million parts of this ‘big aluminum can’ is seen as an extreme example of sustainable reuse and appropriation. American consumers and industry throw away enough aluminum in a year to rebuild our entire airplane commercial fleet every three months.”

Pass the granola, Stardust.

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I happen to like Comic Sans. But that’s just me.

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Thank you, Crust.

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Just the thing to start your day on a cheerful note.

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

China mines 95 percent of the world’s rare earth elements, which have broad commercial and military applications, and are vital to the manufacture of diverse products including large wind turbines and guided missiles. Any curtailment of Chinese supplies of rare earths is likely to be greeted with alarm in Western capitals, particularly because Western companies are believed to keep much smaller stockpiles of rare earths than Japanese companies do.

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Even Australians are noticing.

Certainly, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has made plenty of promises. In an address at Harvard last year, he described his country as a model for how Islam, modernity and democracy can go hand in hand. He said tolerance and respect for religious freedom forms part of Indonesia’s “trans-generational DNA”.

Back in Indonesia, the President is quiet about the fact that moderate Islam is not so respectful of religious freedom if you belong to the Ahmadiyah sect. As yet another daily call to prayer began, I read about the ban on this religious sect for propagating its beliefs, including the tenet that Mohammed was not the final prophet. Indonesia’s Religious Affairs Minister Suryadharma Ali announced the Ahmadiyah congregation “must be disbanded immediately” for violating a 2008 decree prohibiting the group from spreading its teachings. If this “is considered as religious freedom, then I call it an excessive freedom”, Ali said.

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More news from the world of starving ‘Palestinians’.

* Time magazine, which previously claimed that Palestinians were “starving,” now writes of the Palestinian “multistory villas fronted by ornamental porticos and columns,” the “car dealerships selling everything from BMWs to Hyundais,” and the “state of the art gyms with the latest equipment, classes in spinning, kickboxing and Pilates, a sauna and even a smoothie bar.”

* Upcoming on the next Gaza “aid” convoy: an Algerian militant wanted by Swiss authorities for torture

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Hmmm. Wonder whether that would work for me….

I.U. Law still writes and calls me asking for donations. I guess scrawling “Bite Me” on the form and sending it back just doesn’t get through to them.

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Saud tried to cover up the true nature of his relationship with his servant, claiming they were “friends and equals” but a porter at the £259-a-night Landmark Hotel where they were staying said Mr Abdulaziz was treated “like a slave”.

If he ever returns to his home country he faces the possibility of execution – not because of the killing but because being gay is a capital offence there.

Because, you know, killing a servant is not a problem but being gay, well, that will cost you.

Your life under Islam. Don’t say that you weren’t warned.

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Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), the custodian of the scrolls that shed light on the life of Jews and early Christians at the time of Jesus, said on Tuesday it was collaborating with Google’s research and development center in Israel to upload digitized images of the entire collection.

Advanced imaging technology will be installed in the IAA’s laboratories early next year and high-resolution images of each of the scrolls’ 30,000 fragments will be freely accessible on the Internet. The IAA conducted a pilot imaging project in 2008.

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I don’t use Google instant. I’m autistic, which means with Instant on, as I type I get tons of gobbledygook constantly changing, distracting me to the point that I can’t even use the product.

Can a lawsuit under the ADA be far behind? Stay tuned.

This is truly creepy.

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“Youths”, of course, being the newspaper code-word for ‘young Muslim troublemakers’. Merely looking at the pictures is sufficient to reveal that most of them are, how shall we say, ‘of African descent’.

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Beatin’ on the Crust:

Is there an elite class in America, and if yes, what renders it so? Is it mere money or Ivy League polish? Is it because they have great social and political connections and what we used to refer to as their “rolodex”? Is it education? Social skills? Empathy? Enlightenment? Or does one become elite simply by dint of one’s ability to sustain an illusion—to fool oneself and others—that one is a counter-cultural egalitarian, while living what formerly would have been thought a country-club life?

And maybe that is what defines an elite: the lip-curled reproach to anything that has come before this privileged and smug generation—tradition, faith, heroic self-denial—and the illusion that their disdain is somehow a broader and more enlightened “love.”

For the most part, the “yahoo” non-elites do not begrudge the gentry their private jets, their private clubs, and their private schools. They do, however, begrudge them the superior dismissal of their values, and the constant attempts to control how others get to live their lives.

The ineducable masses begrudge the hectoring about their taste for “gas guzzlers,” from people who ride in limos. They dislike being dismissed as “provincial” or “parochial” by people who only associate with others of the same neighborhood and mindset. They are weary of being portrayed as less compassionate, less well-meaning, gosh darn it just lesser people because they believe in giving an equal-opportunity hand-up, rather than an impossible-to-sustain equal-hand-out.

Which is why they’ve been building fortresses. Castro lives in one, too.

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I like him already.

China Miéville has a problem with people impersonating him on Facebook. Adding to the problem is that there’s no way he can report it without being logged in.  He’s tried. And he’s had friends report the fake profiles. They are still up.  He’s resorted to sending a paper letter to Facebook with an explanation that if things don’t change, he’ll ask people to post it.

That’s the problem with a lot of places today. You can’t get in to the site to complain about what the site is doing.

On Facebook, nobody knows you’re a dog — even if you call yourself Barack Obama.

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Slow news day.

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Note to the Obamassiah: Russia isn’t our friend, either.

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I guess rich guys are awakening to the fact that it’s less hassle to hire them than to marry them.

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Only one of the officers who came to the accident scene that day had any integrity. That would be Seifert, a cop with an exemplary record who once shot an armed man to free two hostages. Seifert is the one who took the witness statements that implicated McCue. He is also the one who documented Bowling’s injuries and testified for Bowling in Bowling’s lawsuit. Here is how The Kansas City Star described what happened to Seifert next:

For crossing “the thin blue line,” U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson wrote, Seifert was forced into retirement.

“Seifert was shunned, subjected to gossip and defamation by his police colleagues and treated as a pariah,” Robinson wrote. “…The way Seifert was treated was shameful.”

Seifert also lost part of his pension and his retirement health insurance. So what happened to the cops involved in the cover-up? Ronald Miller, then Kansas City’s police chief, is now the police chief in Topeka. Officer Robert Lane went on to become a councilman for the town of Edwardsville; he was later convicted of participating in a ticket-fixing scheme and sentenced to 10 days in jail plus probation. Steven Culp, then Kansas City’s deputy police chief, is now, incredibly enough, executive director of the Kansas Commission on Peace Officers’ Standards and Training. Agent McCue is still with the DEA.

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Quelle domage.

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Without substantial scandals or wedge issues to work with, the candidates mostly argue about actual policy….

Yeah, what’s up with that?

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Of course, this is from tReason magazine, who sort of have a bit of, shall we say, investment in there not being a draft, but it still has some good points.

Hendrik Hertzberg noted recently in The New Yorker magazine that “for the first time in a century, America is fighting a long war—indeed, two long wars, each longer than our participation in both World Wars put together—without conscription.”

On the other hand, these are ‘little wars’, of the sort that Britain fought for centuries without a draft. I suspect that if the war were with, say, Russia or China, we’d have a draft so fast it would make your head duck and cover.

That change represents a sort of throwback to the early days of the republic. When President James Madison proposed conscription for the War of 1812, New Hampshire’s Daniel Webster rose on the House floor in eloquent opposition.

“Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or wickedness of government may engage it?” he demanded. That was the end of that idea, until the Civil War.

And wouldn’t that put ‘progressives’ in a pickle? All their groovy-granola hippiness would hyperventilate and pass out if the Obamassiah decided to fight racism and inequality somewhere. Popcorn would be at a premium in right-wing households.

David Henderson, an economist who teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., says he sometimes asks his students, all officers, how many favor a return to conscription. “It’s been zero for the last 15 years,” he says. The common view is, “Why would I want people under me who don’t want to be there?”

Funny how they never asked that question during the Cold War, even when officers were being fragged in their own billets.

Another is that it’s a colossal waste to cycle large numbers of people, many of them poorly suited to military service, through the ranks for a couple of years just so they can bail out at the first opportunity.

On the other hand, it makes them all rub shoulders together (take that, Harvard) and gives some actual exposure to the military other than playing Call Of Duty for 48 hours straight. We increasingly have people in Congress, and people voting for people in Congress, whose only exposure to the military was picketing recruiters for extra credit for their Gender Studies seminars and watching Dr. Strangelove in Film Appreciation class (when not asleep).

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As online e-commerce continue to grow, the act of buying from shopping catalogs continues to decline. But Catalogs.com is hoping to change this trend by bringing its library of retail catalogs to the the iPad with a new, free app.

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One wonders when the American government will wake up to the fact that Pakistan is not our friend.

Freakonomics is on the case.

In all my years of studying gangs, I have met only a handful of individuals who have actually participated in the dealer-to-rapper fast track program. Alas, they end up going to jail before they get successful, and most of the ones I’ve seen can’t sing worth a lick. I’m deeply skeptical about rappers who proclaim experience with drug sales. Sure, there are a few exceptions, but for the most part I would be very careful about the claims that are made in songs. Many rappers are highly trained musicians who have spent little time on the streets, as it were — think of Mos Def.

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To slow the spread of a fungus that causes White Nose Syndrome, government agencies are systematically closing caves to the public.

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My father in law told me he wants a tablet but $500 for an iPad seems high to him. I asked him if he’d pay $199 for an Android tablet. He said “where can I get one”? When he told me his primary uses of the tablet will be Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Calendar, I told him he’ll be better off with Android.

Check it out.

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Jeez, where do they think they are, Mexico?

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With the new television season upon us, here are a few things you are virtually certain to see again and again and again: lots of folks spending the better part of their day surrounded by their friends and family in happy conviviality; folks wandering into the unlocked apartments and homes of friends, family and neighbors at any time of the day or night as if this were the most natural thing in the world; friends and family sitting down and having lots of tearful heart-to-hearts; Little League games, school assemblies and dance recitals, all attended by, you guessed it, scads of friends and family.

What makes this so remarkable is that it has been happening at a time when it is increasingly difficult to find this kind of deep social interaction anyplace but on TV. Nearly a decade ago, Harvard professor Robert Putnam observed in his classic “Bowling Alone” that Americans had become more and more disconnected from one another and from their society. As Putnam put it, “For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago — silently, without warning — that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous current.” It was a current that pulled Americans apart.

This decline in real friendships may account in part for the dramatic rise of virtual friendships like those on social-networking sites where being “friended” is less a sign of personal engagement than a quantitative measure of how many people your life has brushed and how many names you can collect, but this is friendship lite. Facebook, in fact, only underscores how much traditional friendship — friendship in which you meet, talk and share — has become an anachronism and how much being “friended” is an ironic term.

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These would be the four Democrats [Sen. Barbara Boxer (D, CA); Rep. Henry Waxman (D, CA-30); Rep. Dennis Kuchinich (D, OH-10); and Rep. Raul Grijavla (D, AZ-07)] who provided letters of introduction and support to the pro-terrorist groups Code Pink/Global Exchange in 2004.  Those groups used these letters to facilitate their delivery over a half a million dollars’ worth of aid to terrorists in Fallujah actively fighting American troops; which is, by the way, treason by any reasonable interpretation of the US Constitution.

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And very well, too.

‘No matter how talented you are, your talent is going to fail you if you’re not skilled.’

‘I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill.’

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That question has been central to Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.

It didn’t turn out that way. In poring over medical journals, he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings. Of course, medical-science “never minds” are hardly secret. And they sometimes make headlines, as when in recent years large studies or growing consensuses of researchers concluded that mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests are far less useful cancer-detection tools than we had been told; or when widely prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil were revealed to be no more effective than a placebo for most cases of depression; or when we learned that staying out of the sun entirely can actually increase cancer risks; or when we were told that the advice to drink lots of water during intense exercise was potentially fatal; or when, last April, we were informed that taking fish oil, exercising, and doing puzzles doesn’t really help fend off Alzheimer’s disease, as long claimed. Peer-reviewed studies have come to opposite conclusions on whether using cell phones can cause brain cancer, whether sleeping more than eight hours a night is healthful or dangerous, whether taking aspirin every day is more likely to save your life or cut it short, and whether routine angioplasty works better than pills to unclog heart arteries.

Q: What is the most serious problem facing medicine today?

A: Getting funding.

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Teeing up the next fight with the Nanny State.

In academic papers with titles such as, “Your Chair: Comfortable but Deadly,” physicians point to surprising new research showing higher rates of diabetes, obesity, heart disease and even mortality among people who sit for long stretches. A study earlier this year in the American Journal of Epidemiology showed that among 123,000 adults followed over 14 years, those who sat more than six hours a day were at least 18 percent more likely to die than those who sat less than three hours a day.

“Every rock we turn over when it comes to sitting is stunning,” said Marc Hamilton, a leading researcher on inactivity physiology at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana. “Sitting is hazardous. It’s dangerous. We are on the cusp of a major revolution about what we think of as healthy behavior in the workplace.” He calls sitting “the new smoking.”

Not so fast, other experts say. Standing too much at work will cause more long-term back injuries – ask factory workers, they say. Incidences of varicose veins among women will increase. The heart will have to pump more. Alan Hedge, a noted ergonomics scholar at Cornell University, went so far as to call standing at work “one of the stupidest things one would ever want to do. This is the high heels of the furniture industry.”

Russ Roberts of Cafe Hayek is another datapoint on Steve’s mystical journey.

I wasn’t going to get one–I have a Kindle for reading which I like a lot and my laptop goes everywhere with me–so I have all my photos (about 3000) and all my music (about 3000 songs). What use would I have for a device that weighed more than the Kindle, promised to distract me from reading with browsing and email, and added little functionality beyond my laptop?

Then I met someone who treated it like a serious business tool.

Then I had an idea for a serious economics education app for the device.

Then someone gave me one.

Hey, if ‘somebody gave me one’, I’d use it too.

It’s gloriously beautiful. I’ve added apps and bought some I don’t expect to use much just because I want to admire they way they look on the screen. Examples are Star Walk, Solar Walk and the Louvre app.

So it’s a toy. My. How nice.

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A clever and interesting concept.

David Friedman knows more than most.

The central difference, so far as I can see, is that almost all U.K. recreation consists of performances for an audience, usually a paying audience. Almost all SCA recreation, and I think (although I might be mistaken) most U.S. recreation in other periods, most notably the U.S. Civil War, is done by and for the participants. An SCA tournament has an audience, but it is a medieval audience—an audience of participants dressed in some attempt at period clothing. The spectator at the tournament may also be one of the people cooking the evening’s feast or, later, teaching renaissance dances.