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Ok, let’s just be clear here. Abdulmutallab — last year’s underwear bomber — was successful in getting on the plane. What stopped him was not TSA security, but passengers on the plane seeing what he was up to. That brings up a separate question. Has the TSA ever caught anyone with a bomb with these procedures, ever? Security theater doesn’t make people safer.

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I’ve always had an issue with the Theatrical Security Administration. In my opinion, if we were concerned with anything other than creating the illusion of security, we would lay-off half of the TSA agents, hire bomb and chemical-sniffing dogs to check the plane after boarding and cargo hold, and put a US Marshal on every flight – in addition to requiring full searches for airport personnel and their vehicles. As it stands now, airport personnel – restaurant workers, baggage handlers, etc – are not subject to the same security requirements as passengers, and oftentimes only have to wave their badges in order to get into the secure areas of the airport.

And, of course, any smart terrorist would work through the maintenance system to plant explosives, rather than try to sneak them on the plane as a passenger. But I guess we’re only interested in catching the dumb ones.

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The women tempted me, and I drooled. Damned kufr.

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As if anybody cared.

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The problem with having academics in government is that they live their entire lives off of other people’s money — their parents pay for them to go to school, scholarships and academic jobs subsidize their graduate study, and they beg for money from government and foundations ever afterward.

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The irony that Haiti’s putative saviours, in the aftermath of hurricanes and an apocalyptic earthquake, may have brought a water-borne bacterium called Vibrio cholerae has hit what were already fraught preparations for elections on 28 November. Foreign diplomats are holding their breath for the vote to go ahead on schedule.

The facts are thus: an exploding epidemic has killed more than 1,000, infected tens of thousands and spread anxiety through slums and tent cities. There had been no cholera here in living memory. The strain appears to be from south Asia. Soldiers from Nepal, which has cholera, moved into a base beside the Artibonite river in early October. The base has sanitation problems. A week later the river was contaminated and people in the area started vomiting and getting diarrhoea.

So much for Third-World Solidarity. Guess those Nasty Old White Imperialists may be good for something after all.

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When there are no Jews or Americans to kill, Muslims will cheerfully kill each other.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohamed.

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

Nor is Federal grant money going to come looking for you.

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Scientists at the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Modular Solid State Technologies EMFT in Munich have developed dressing materials and plasters which indicate pathological changes in the skin. If an infection is present, the color of the dressing changes from yellow to purple.

Now that’s clever.

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Dude, it’s been a long day.

Gotta love Australians–even the animals.

Check it out.

For sufficiently ballsy values of ‘up’.

Read it. And watch the video.

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The borders of the entity known as “Europe” make neither geographical nor cultural sense. The idea of Europe as a “continent” is ludicrous: it is bounded by the Norwegian Sea and Atlantic Ocean on the west (except for Iceland), the Barents Sea and the White Sea on the north, the Ural Mountains on the east, and the Mediterranean Sea, the Bosphorus, the Black Sea, and the Caucasus Mountains on the south. Oh, and Turkey gets a special exception: it lies south of the Black Sea and east of the Bosphorus, but since a tiny piece of it (including Constantinople) lies west of the Bosphorus, Turkey gets to be part of “Europe”.

Isn’t that special?

As part of ‘Europe’, Turkey now gets all the advantages (and none of the headaches) of the conquest that Muslims have been working at for the last 1400 years.

The concept of human rights was integral to the CoE from its very inception. Turkey, however, like any other Islamic country, has different ideas than most Europeans about what the term “human rights” means. And, since Turkey has just assumed the rotating chairmanship of the Council of Europe, its version of human rights will gain greater visibility over the next few months.

Turkey — especially under its current fundamentalist Islamic government — would dearly love to reopen the gateway to Europe that was closed to the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683. The EU, with its corrupt welfare system and absence of internal borders, is the preferred vessel to carry tens of millions more Muslims into Europe. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and the Council of Europe affords yet another opportunity to poke a sharp stick into the underbelly of that amorphous region formerly known as Europe.

Read it.

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

Last week, the DOJ released a rather weird report on five U. S. Attorneys who stayed in hotels that were more expensive than generally permitted by Department guidelines between 2007 and 2009. The point of the report would be difficult to grasp without the additional information, readily supplied by reporters, that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was “U.S. Attorney C.” Sort of like Client Number 9, except that the total amount of Christie’s alleged budget-busting added up to a whopping $2,176. Most of this was because Christie stayed at hotels where he was to deliver a speech the next day.

Imagine that–actually staying at the hotel where he was to speak the next day. The swine! String him up! (Use lots of rope, because he’s a fattie!)

FuturePundit draws back the curtain.

Consumers who are deeply religious are less likely to display an explicit preference for a particular brand, while more secular populations are more prone to define their self-worth through loyalty to corporate brands instead of religious denominations.

Read it. The inventor of Mathematica is optimistic.

The most important is that programs a user might specify with short pieces of natural language must typically be short—and readable—in the computer language. Because otherwise the user won’t be able to tell—at least not easily—whether the program that’s been produced actually does what they want.

A second, somewhat related, criterion is that it must be possible for arbitrary program fragments to stand alone—so that large programs can realistically be built up incrementally, much like a description in natural language is built up incrementally with sentences and the like.

Well, to get the first of these characteristics requires a very high-level language, in which there are already many constructs already built in to the language—and well enough designed that they all fit together without messy “glue” code.

And to get the second characteristic essentially requires a symbolic language, in which any piece of any program is always a meaningful symbolic expression.

Well, conveniently enough, there is one language that satisfies rather well both these requirements: Mathematica!

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

Jacob Sullum kicks over a rock.

First the government encouraged illicit production of methamphetamine by restricting access to legal speed. Then it encouraged pseudoephedrine-based production by banning or restricting other precursors. Appalled by all the scary, toxic, flammable meth labs that subsequently popped up around the country, it restricted access to cold and allergy remedies containing pseudoephedrine, forcing customers to ask pharmacists for them, sign a registry, and abide by quantity limits. Those restrictions, in turn, encouraged a shift to the “shake and bake” method for producing meth, which is less complicated and does not require as much pseudoephedrine but is in some ways more dangerous and more environmentally destructive. The next logical step, according to Lincoln County, Oregon, District Attorney Rob Bovett, is to require a prescription for products containing pseudoephedrine, thereby banning all over-the-counter sales. This time for sure!

Read it.

No wonder California is broke — and likely to get broker.

I know of no other instance of a court upholding a subsidy for criminals.

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‘God is the Greatest’, ‘Death to Israel’, and ‘Death to America’, were among slogans chanted by the masses in unison as they gathered in the Desert of Arafat, 20 kms (12 miles) from Mecca, for a day of prayer and meditation.

And this is from an Arab source, so presumably it’s accurate.

Imagine what the effect would be if pilgrims in Rome during Easter changed “Death to Muslims! Death to Saudi Arabia!”. Imagine what news organizations around the world would have to say about it.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace you got there, Mohamed.

Read it.

Their transitional federal administration controls little more than a few blocks of the capital, and then only thanks to the muscle provided by several thousand African Union peacekeepers.

Beyond those few streets, there is chaos. There has been no central authority to build roads, hire teachers, stock hospitals or impose order for almost two decades.

Into that vacuum rushed powerful clans, whose head-men cut up the country into fiefdoms they taxed like mediaeval lords, to pay for guns. When there was no policeman to arrest them, or courts to try them, their rule was absolute.

In other words, they’re exactly where they were when the Europeans got there two hundred years ago, except with modern weapons technology. This is where most of Africa and Asia would be if left to their natural inclinations.

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Of course, we’ve seen similar stories before. But where this one got even odder is that after he went to the ticket counter and was able to get his ticket refunded (even though it was a non-refundable ticket), he was approached by a man in a suit and two of the people who had both detained him in the security area and escorted him out of it — and told that he could not leave the airport until he submitted to the invasive screening. If he tried to leave, he was told he would be sued and could face fines of $10,000.

Oh, I would so love to be the lawyer representing him in this case.

Time to take back our lives from the mind-numbed bureaucrats. Wakey wakey.

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Zuckerberg told the audience: “The farm bureau has agreed to give us FB.com and we in return have agreed to not sell Farm subsidies.”

I guess he’s not the semi-autistic jerk that everybody pretends he is.

Matt Welsh follows the money.

And who could blame him? I’d rather work at Google than a second-rate university any day.

But the most interesting part, to me, is this:

And of course the amount of overhead and red tape (grant proposals, teaching, committee work, etc.) you have to do apart from the interesting technical work severely limits your ability to actually get to that point.

Note that TEACHING is considered OVERHEAD/RED TAPE, like begging for money (grant proposals) and shuffling paper (committee work).

This points up one of the basic flaws in the modern university system: Its primary objective is research, and teaching is only something they do on the side, like begging money from the government and holding interminable faculty meetings. This is, of course, the baleful influence of the German system that was imported into the U.S. in the 19th century and has been festering here every since.

Read it.

Of course, it’s not a real AK-47, which is a fully automatic weapon that is illegal to own for almost everybody these days. It will probably be a semi-automatic version.

Joel Kotkin lays it out.

In the future, historians may likely mark the 2010 midterm elections as the end of the California era and the beginning of the Texas one. In one stunning stroke, amid a national conservative tide, California voters essentially ratified a political and regulatory regime that has left much of the state unemployed and many others looking for the exits.

Instead of a role model, California  has become a cautionary tale of mismanagement of what by all rights should be the country’s most prosperous big state. Its poverty rate is at least two points above the national average; its unemployment rate nearly three points above the national average.

This state of crisis is likely to become the norm for the Golden State. In contrast to other hard-hit states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada, which all opted for pro-business, fiscally responsible candidates, California voters decisively handed virtually total power to a motley coalition of Democratic-machine politicians, public employee unions, green activists and rent-seeking special interests.

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God forbid two kids should sell cupcakes without a permit.

When Councilman Michael Wolfensohn found out the sale wasn’t for charity–the kids instead hoped to earn enough to one day open a restaurant–he called in the officers.

There’s public service for you.

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Tanzania’s first elected albino member of parliament fears his life could be in danger in the east African country where albino hunters kill their victims and use their blood and body parts for witchcraft.

Sounds like most Democrats’ view of Utah.

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When it comes to protecting against terrorism, this is how things usually go: A danger presents itself. The federal government responds with new rules that erode privacy, treat innocent people as suspicious, and blur the distinction between life in a free society and life in a correctional facility. And we all tamely accept the new intrusions, like sheep being shorn.

Rather depressing, when you come to think about it. Not many Minutemen in the security line.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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Let’s say you’ve got a nice, digitized version of some scientific data, and you’ve already made reasonable choices about how close to the raw data you want to get in what you preserve. Better yet, you’ve hounded your students often enough that they’ve placed it in a single format and provided all the annotations that are needed to make sense of the data. You’re all set to preserve it and share it with the rest of the scientific community. Except you aren’t, because doing so creates its own challenges.

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Don’t say you never learn anything useful here.

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China’s military can destroy five out of six U.S. bases in Asia with waves of missile strikes as the result of its large-scale military buildup that threatens U.S. access and freedom of navigation in East Asia, according to a forthcoming congressional report.

David Friedman continues his discussion.

Generalizing the point, “sustainability” becomes an argument against whatever policies one disapproves of, in favor of whatever policies one approves of, and adds nothing beyond a rhetorical club with which partisans can beat on those who disagree with them.

If a particular policy makes potable water less available to future generations, with the result that many of them get drinking water in bottles rather than from the tap, but also makes future generations enough richer to more than pay the cost of that bottled water, is that policy consistent with sustainability?

If we define sustainability in terms of individual effects, treating as unsustainable anything which makes future generations less able to meet any one of their needs, there may be no policies at all that are sustainable, since each alternative alters the future in different ways and any alteration is likely to be bad in at least one respect. If, more plausibly, we define it in terms of net effects, then the demand for sustainability turns into the demand that we not follow policies that make future generations worse off than the present generation.

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The company’s goals are to build a headquarters that would be “nurturing and regenerative to the environment, provide a vibrant community and work/life balance for all,” Google real estate chief David Radcliffe wrote in a letter to city officials earlier this year.

The new ‘company town’, with fitness and day care facilities.

Moe Lane is irate.

Yes, “steal.”  Rep. Charles Rangel was not allowed to use money from his leadership PAC to pay his legal bills, it beggars belief that he did not know that he was not allowed to use money from his leadership PAC to pay his legal bills, and yet he did it anyway.  If we can’t call the deliberate diversion of money that was raised and allocated for other people’s use ‘theft’ then we might as well give up the entire civilization thing now and go back to living in caves.

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

Read it.

Door #1: Have nude pictures of yourself beamed to some video monitor to be viewed by a total stranger where it may or may not be stored; or,

Door #2: Allow yourself to be groped, poked, patted down, felt up, frisked, and squeezed at the hands of some police academy reject in a Smurf-blue uniform; or…

Door #3: Don’t travel.

I picked Door #3 ten years ago and never regretted it.

It’s nice to see some public pushback on this, but it won’t last. The TSA will, under political pressure, back off just enough for the noise to go down to an acceptable level, and will then keep on doin’ what they’re doin’.

An intelligent government would look at how El Al Airlines does their security screening: They don’t have to put up with this shit, and they don’t have bomb scares, either. But ‘intelligent’ and ‘government’ don’t go together in North America, and that’s the sad truth.

Read it.

Utopia approaches.

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The Security Theater at airports is turning into a game of Angry Birds.

Lileks on preventive medicine.

Have you experienced an adverse reaction to the flu vaccine previously? Yes, I developed a sudden taste for the “Real Housewives” series. Ran through them all on Netflix. Felt dirty. Do you currently have a fever, rash, or the sensation of a million spiders running beneath your skin? Yeah, but in college we called that “Saturday morning.”

Read it.

Right now it’s a joke, but soon it will be a reality.

Jeff Jarvis has some primary source material on what young people are like today.

Jeff is a tenured professor at a Left Coast urban university, and so is Hip And Trendy; hence his evaluation of These Kids Today, above. I’m not so optimistic, but I suppose that’s just me. His attitudes toward the mainstream Voices of the Crust are fairly refreshing, however, and indicate that perhaps the Crust is loosening up a bit. We’ll see.

Read it.

“For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay, here are the Two Things about economics. One: Incentives matter. Two: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

Computer Programming:

1. Every problem can be solved by breaking it up into a series of smaller problems.
2. The computer will always do exactly what you tell it to.

Software Engineering:

1. Writing the code is the easy part. Writing it so someone else can understand it later is the important part.
2. Make it work, then make it elegant, then make it fast.

Read it.

A woman who smashed a broken bottle into Leonardo DiCaprio’s face has pleaded ‘no contest’ to assault with a deadly weapon.

Tell the truth: Haven’t we all wanted to do that?

Watch it.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

Making sure we can continue our present activities into the indefinite future makes sense only if we believe that we will be doing those things into the indefinite future. Judged by what we have seen in the past and can guess about the future, that is very unlikely. We do not know what the world of forty or fifty years hence will be like, but it will not be the same as the present world, hence it is very unlikely that we will be doing the same things in the same way and requiring the same resources to do them with.

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ake, for instance, what just went down on Planet Calypso, where one of Entropia’s wealthier players has sold off his interests in a “resort asteroid” for an eye-popping $635,000.

The seller is Jon Jacobs, also known as the character ‘Neverdie’. He originally purchased the asteroid in 2005 — eventually converting it into the extravagant resort ‘Club Neverdie’ — for the then-record price of $100,000. For those keeping score, that’s a gain of over $500,000 in just five years. In nerdier terms, that’s an ROI of 535%. Match that, Citibank.

Eric Karjaluoto has an interesting perspective on life.

A rental mindset reminds us that every material thing we have is only in our possession temporarily. We don’t own our computers, we’re just renting the gear, until it goes to rest in a landfill. We don’t own our ideas, they are simply an amalgamation and mingling of those many influences lent to us by others. And we don’t even own the money in our bank accounts or investment portfolio. As we recently witnessed, it only takes a bit of collective panic to reduce the agreed upon value of these things substantially.

Read it.

I am finding the spate of recent articles about the huge and growing inequality of wealth in the US pretty tedious.  I suspect they are making some basic mistakes.  They usually take the form of saying the wealthiest X percent of the US population owns Y percent of the wealth, where Y is a much bigger number than X.  What I don’t get is, why should I care about the relationship of X and Y?

Envry and resentment–emotions that ‘progressives’ clutch close to their bosoms to make up for the fact that every time they try to improve conditions they only get worse.

We humans are an envious breed, but we mostly put our own wealth ahead of equality.  And if I could be a few thousand dollars a year better off, at the cost, so to speak, of some guy who lives in some gated paradise I don’t even drive by, becoming millions richer than he already is, well that is a sacrifice I am prepared to make.  As long as he is not around to rub my face in the fact that while he’s buying a new jet, I’m just buying a riding mower, I don’t care.

Ah,  but Democrats do, and they’re the ones passing the silly laws … and, unfortunately, writing the tax code.

Read it.

The new discovery by Dr Leo James and colleagues transforms the previous scientific understanding of our immunity to viral diseases like the common cold, ‘winter vomiting’ and gastroenteritis.

It shows that antibodies can enter cells and that once inside, they then trigger a response, led by a protein called TRIM21.

Watch it.