Read it.

Now, this is just stupid. Who the farg cares?

This is just Democrat Bill Richardson grasping for some cheap publicity — like his current trip to North Korea, which is a funny place to be for someone who is supposedly being paid to be the Governor of New Mexico. (He was just as bad as a Congressman, but it got him to the Governor’s mansion, so I guess he learned a bad habit.)

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A Voice of the Crust tries a little sophistry in an attempt to save Obamacare.

Read it.

Kickstarter is an amazing idea that may just represent the future of technical innovation.

The watch is pretty cool, too.

Read it.

Notice how Wikileaks ignores Russia, China, North Korea, all African countries, all Muslim countries — indeed, any country in which we would not be surprised to find the government ‘systematically torturing civilians’ — in order to focus on pro-Western democracies.

What do they know that you don’t?

Read it.

Square inch anthropology says, in effect, “look, we don’t claim to know everything about this culture, but we do have relative confidence in one or two things within it.  In this case: Cocktail culture and the Betty Page style.”  We may now make claims to knowledge without pretending any overarching knowledge or competence.

Watch it.

Read it.

I remember reading detailed investigative reports about the KLA back in 1999, and that’s when it became obvious that we were on the wrong side. It was clear that we were pushing for the establishment of a well-armed Saudi-bankrolled gangster state in the Balkans, and that is exactly what we got.

Read it.

The digital storehouse, which comprises words and short phrases as well as a year-by-year count of how often they appear, represents the first time a data set of this magnitude and searching tools are at the disposal of Ph.D.’s, middle school students and anyone else who likes to spend time in front of a small screen. It consists of the 500 billion words that are contained in books published between 1800 and 2000 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Russian and Hebrew.

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But there’s more to civil rights than the Constitution.  Congress and the state legislatures have also passed laws that go beyond the constitutional minimums.  One of the most important of these is the Americans with Disabilities Act.  Could the ADA be applied to superpowers?  As is so often the case, the answer is mixed.

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The Turkish military has been, since Ataturk’s time, the bulwark keeping Turkey from turning into another ‘Islamic Republic’ like Iran. This represents the most serious attempt yet to break their power. There are a number of potentially very bad endings to this story.

Read it.

DriveMeCrazy, developed by Shazam co-founder Philip Inghelbrecht, is a voice-activated app that encourages drivers to report bad behavior by reciting the offender’s license plate into a smartphone. The poor sap gets “flagged” and receives a virtual “ticket,” which may not sound like much until you realize all the information — along with date, time and location of the “offense” — is sent to the DMV and insurance companies.

Anyone can write a ticket, even pedestrians and cyclists. No one is safe from being tattled on. Even if you don’t use the program, which went live Wednesday, you can’t opt out of being flagged if someone thinks you’re driving like a schmuck. Inghelbrecht is emphatic in saying he sees no privacy issues with the app and insists the end of road-going anonymity can only improve safety.

I like it. It has texture, and scope. Unfortunately, it’s only for the iPhone so far, but let’s hope there’s an Android version in our future.

“There’s going to be noise in the data,” Inghelbrecht conceded.

Still, the company is developing algorithms that sort out malicious flags from relevant data. For each flag, he said, “we capture the day, the time, the location, obviously the license plate and the unique device identifier on [a flagger’s] iPhone. You can quickly detect malicious use.” Safeguards ensure that multiple flags of the same driver from the same user are ignored, and mistakenly entered plates are matched with other location data.

Megan McArdle kicks over a rock.

Like most left-wing groups, this one is named for the things in which it is not engaged: It has nothing to do with science, nor is it in the public interest.

One shudders to consider that when Patrick Henry stood up in St. John’s Church and declared “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!”, he was offering to exchange his life for a freedom that would then be passed down people like this . . . people who would gleefully toss that freedom away with both hands if, by so doing, they might protect themselves from the harrowing predations of . . . a cheap plastic toy.

Exactly.

Monet Parham, by the way, seems to be an activist employed by the California government to advocate the ingestion of vegetables, though some pains seem to have been taken to obscure this connection.

As I’ve been saying (and the Lamestream Media haven’t) all along.

Read it.

“We’ll present a budget on Jan. 10. It will be a very tough budget, but it will be transparent,” he said. “We’ll lay it out as best I can. We’ve been living in fantasy land. It is much worse than I thought. I’m shocked.”

Uh, Jer, that’s your side what was doin’ it.

“This is really a huge challenge, unprecedented in my lifetime,” Brown told hundreds of educators, union representatives and parents who had gathered at UCLA. “I can’t promise you there won’t be more cuts, because there will be.”

Yeah, right.

These conditions, the budget session made clear, are likely to get worse. The state faces a $28-billion budget gap for the next 18 months, and roughly $20-billion deficits annually through the 2015-16 fiscal year. Non-university education accounts for roughly 40% of state spending, so cuts tend to significantly affect the state schools.

Looks like cuts, eh, Jer?

“The day of reckoning is upon us and I’m determined to bite the bullet, get it done in whatever way the consensus of California can be built,” he said. “Fair, transparent and enduring — that’s my goal.”

Educators responded by calling for an end to cuts, asking for greater discretion at the local level as to how dwindling dollars are spent, urging the state to seek more federal funding and requesting legislation that would allow them to increase local property taxes with 55% of the vote rather than the current requirement of two-thirds.

And there you have it — California heads toward the ditch, and the drivers are arguing over the seatcovers.

Read it.

I’m curious as to how they plan to enforce this. After all, these are organized bodies of criminals we’re talking about here.

This reminds me of the notion of California solving its budget deficit by taxing growers of marijuana — which is (last time I looked) illegal to start with.

Read it.

Don’t ever say we never have useful stuff here.

The advice is based on recent scientific analyses showing that a nuclear attack is much more survivable if you immediately shield yourself from the lethal radiation that follows a blast, a simple tactic seen as saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Even staying in a car, the studies show, would reduce casualties by more than 50 percent; hunkering down in a basement would be better by far.

Read it.

She looks pretty white to me. When I think of aborigines, I think of someone like this. Perhaps she’s a Magic Aborigine, like the Obamassiah is a Magic Negro.

Read it.

Perhaps they could hitch a ride with some of the thousands of Jews who are fleeing Swedish cities because of violence on the part of Muslims.

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A timely reminder that, while Russia is no longer a Communist dictatorship, it’s by no means a liberal republic.

Read it.

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

I do hate Brussels sprouts, though.

Read it.

The headline ought to read, ‘Leftist Activist Government Employee sues McDonald’s Over Happy Meals.’

Read it.

I don’t know which is more irritating: The fact that he had a wife, or the fact that anyone takes what she has to say seriously.

No, he wasn’t a ‘gentle giant’; gentle giants don’t try to shoot up a school board meeting.

Many people have problems with the economy, and many people’s wives lose their jobs; they don’t go and shoot up school board meetings. The guy was defective, and we’re rid of him. That’s all that needs to be said.

The Other McCain is, as you may imagine, having a great deal of fun with this one.

Read it.

Many liberals reacted to the erosion of their brand by changing labels. They became self-identified “progressives.” Although this was a shrewd move, it has been undermined by the large-scale unpopularity of the policies served up by progressives the first time (in modern history) that they governed under that label.

The alternative to re-labeling is de-labeling. And, though most progressives seem willing to stick with the progressive label for a while longer, some nervous nellies have concluded that resisting labels – and hoping that conservatives somehow will be shamed into following suit – will better serve their interests.

Read it.

Seventeen states banned phosphates from dishwasher detergents because the chemical compounds also pollute lakes, bays and streams. They create algae blooms and starve fish of oxygen.

Sandra Young was so mad that she called Procter & Gamble, which makes Cascade, to complain. But when she did, a company representative told her to be more careful about which pans she puts into her dishwasher.

“He said, ‘Well, if you’re really having that hard of a problem, maybe you should wash your dishes by hand.’ Which I thought was kind of strange for an automatic dishwashing company.”

Susan Baba from Procter & Gamble says the company had no choice. It just wasn’t feasible to make detergent with phosphates for some states and without them for others.

But not everyone is willing to adjust. Sandra Young figured out a way to undo the phosphate ban — at least in her own kitchen.

She bought some trisodium phosphate at a hardware store and started mixing her own formula.

“It seems to be working pretty good,” Young says.

Read it.

I wasn’t aware that Pashtuns weren’t white. Huh. You learn something new every day.

Ah, well. The wage of sin and all that.

Read it.

Let’s face it, things were just better in the Good Old Days.

Read it.

Remember Mystique impersonating the asshole Senator in the first X-Men movie.

Read it.

The bones of Cecil John Rhodes, the founder of Rhodesia, should be immediately exhumed and sent back to Britain as it is an affront to postcolonial sensibilities, according to a Zimbabwean politician.

Since the ‘postcolonial sensibilities’ displayed in modern Zimbabwe appear to consist of robbery, murder, and totalitarian oppression — much like pre-cololonial Zimbabwe — I imagine that Rhodes wouldn’t mind escaping the country as so many of his fellow Persons of European Ethnicity have done.

Check it out.

Read it.

A look into a geeked-out Brooklyn office reveals the beginnings of a product that every nerd in America would buy: a front door that unlocks when you check in.

Hall and his brother Erin Sparling, also a Web developer, installed the Foursquare door a couple of months ago as a way to let their handful of underlings enter the office. He took me through the door system and the rest of his uber-wired stuff, which include a home-built touch-screen media system, improvised satellite T1 connection, and a coffee table made of an Apple X-serve.

Read it.

This is from some outfit named Glassdoor.com, and I have no idea what qualifies them to issue these awards. Nevertheless, I am eager to embrace any external validation of the fact that my employer (whoever it may be) will never be on one of these lists.

Read it.

Money from a £60 million programme to prevent violent extremism should be targeted at individuals in danger of radicalisation – like the Stockholm bomber – instead of being used to fund community groups, according to the security minister Baroness Neville-Jones.

‘Security minister’? Yeah, that would really make me feel secure. ‘Give me money or I’ll become a radical!’ Gee, that’s worked so many times before.

Read it.

The Kitara discards old fashioned strings and has you strumming along on a multitouch display instead, populating the fretboard with a litany of buttons that modify the aural output from your digital input. It has an onboard synthesizer, but the real magic will happen once you plug it into your own audio equipment and start experimenting. Basically, it’s like the Kinect of electronic music….

We have the technology.

Read it.

Another example of the heavy hand of government destroying cultural institutions through a hypersensitivity to perceived benefit for the slaves consumers.

Of all the charges against street food vendors, the one that’s had the most staying power is cleanliness. If one views health in terms of code violations, a study has confirmed that many rules, from wearing gloves while preparing food to washing hands, are indeed broken routinely. But despite these rampant rule violations, the study’s authors concede that no hard data links eating street food to higher rates of illness than eating at home or in restaurants. And anyone who’s worked in the industry knows that even legal restaurants aren’t exactly paragons of rule-following, either. In fact, since street food vendors are not hidden from their customers by walls like restaurant cooks, consumers may actually have more information about cleanliness, and may be in a better position to pick food that lives up to their standards.

Aside from street food sold openly in busy city centers, another common category of low-cost food includes the many unlicensed, clandestine restaurants in America’s black urban ghettos. Around since at least the Great Migrations of blacks out of the South, these establishments sit at the margins of society, serving low-cost meals but kept from the light of day by zoning and health rules, compounded by a longstanding mistrust of government. Tyler Cowen has rightly noted how few restaurants one sees as one drives through neighborhoods southeast of the Anacostia River in Washington, DC, but women selling soul food out of their homes or in local meeting places like barbershops appear quite often in Off the Books, Sudhir Venkatesh’s ethnography of the underground urban economy.

Read it.

Dozens of asylum seekers are feared to have died after their boat was smashed against the rocks of Christmas Island in rough seas.

Recently, there have been reports of overcrowding at the centre and of detainees being forced to live in tents.

Earlier this year detainees staged a protest over the conditions, sewing their lips together and refusing to eat.

Sounds like a win-win.

What is this widespread assumption that if somebody likes Country A more than his home country, he has some sort of innate right to go to Country A?

Read it.

After all, who wouldn’t want a murderer delivering his mail?

I am not making this up.

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As high-flying lawyer Deidre Clark seeks £3.5 million in damages following her sacking after writing an erotic novel based on her experience as an expat in Moscow, Iain Hollingshead discovers that behaving badly is a prerequisite of working abroad.

There’s a career plan for you.

Read it.

Researchers have long struggled to explain the “Great Dying” that occurred at the end of the Permian period. Some think that the extinction was a long, drawn-out affair caused by multiple factors — perhaps gradual changes in oceanic or atmospheric chemistry (SN: 5/28/05, p. 339). Others have blamed a single catastrophic event such as a belch of methane from the seafloor or an asteroid impact (SN: 2/24/01, p. 116) like the one thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs and other species 65 million years ago.

Volcanoes might be one of those calamities. In Siberia, around 250 million years ago, a series of massive volcanic eruptions spewed out lava over more than 2 million square kilometers. Some scientists have blamed these eruptions, known as the Siberian Traps, for climatic changes that contributed to the extinction.

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President Barack Obama signed an executive order Tuesday establishing a White House Council for Community Solutions, with Jon Bon Jovi – Democratic troubadour and hair band hero – as a founding member.

Pissing away taxpayer money like this is why the country is so badly in debt.

Read it.

Wolverine is one of a number of comic book characters who is extremely difficult to kill. It has been theorized that it would take decapitation followed by immediate removal of his head from the vicinity of his body to effectively kill him. Similarly, though Superman has died, he can survive far, far more punishment than a standard homo sapiens sapiens.

Which raises the question: if it is impossible for a given action to kill a potential target, does it constitute a crime? And if so, which crime?

Read it.

Four young British Muslim extremists chanted religious slogans as they battered a prison officer. The gang chanted “death to the Kuffar” (non-believer) and “Allah Akbar” (God is Great) as they laid into the warder – who is in his 40s – after prayers.

Welcome to Lodonistan. Be sure to take your shoes off and wash your hands.

Megan McArdle is always worth reading.

Take the Endangered Species Act, which is supposed to protect species on private land.  But of course, if you find an endangered species, the thing to do is get rid of its habitat right away, because if anyone else finds your endangered species, you my substantially lose the use of your land.  If the government were paying for endangered species, on the other hand, people would be searching assiduously for snail darters and spotted owls.

If we only want things when we can stick other people with the bill, then we probably shouldn’t have most of those things.

The Other McCain is having entirely too much fun with the No Labels people.

Few things are more predictable than this: Whenever Republicans are on the upswing — whenever conservatives are on fire with enthusiasm, proclaiming their core principles and clearly on the winning side of important issues — the mainstream media will devote enormous coverage to an alleged groundswell of discontented moderates whose demands for “bipartisanship” and “civility” are accompanied by condemnation of “divisiveness” and complaints that “extremists” are ignoring the vast majority of independent “centrist” voters.

Let the reader note that we never heard any such complaints about “divisiveness” and “extremism” after Obama was elected and Democrats were ramming their partisan agenda through Congress.

The purpose of No Labels, of course, is to give the most irredeemably stupid “independent” voters an excuse to keep voting for Democrats. The mere fact that “No Labels” gets an 808-word free advertisement on the op-ed page of the Washington Post should tell you all you need to know about this alleged movement: It’s a ginned-up Establishment scam with no real activist constituency.

Jonah Goldberg is not fooled.

I’m deadly serious about how stupid and pernicious I think this whole thing is.

I think Stan Kurtz had it right. No Labels claims it wants to make it easier to talk about politics by making it more difficult for people it dislikes to talk about politics. It’s political correctness by a different name (and we all know how there are no labels in political correctness!).

I’ve been tuning in and out of the livecast of the NoLabelpalooza and it is so transparently obvious that this is a Trojan horse for a bunch of defeated liberal and moderate politicians to find some new rationale for their continued political relevance.

Some of the people involved in No Labels are very smart and very decent people who, as far as I can tell, have a deep patriotic love for America. What they seem to lack is sufficient respect for Americans and their ability to sort out these issues. They seem to think they are the Chosen People of politics with a unique insight into what is a legitimate point and what is an illegitimate one. They have contempt for the idea that there are sincere philosophical and political disagreements and so they try to belittle and dismiss those disagreements by waving them away as “labels” or name-calling (remember Barack Obama at the healthcare summit dismissing every inconvenient point as a “talking point”?).

Read it.

Now maybe they’ll quit whining and we can start working on diseases that affect everybody, like cancer.

Read it.

Towards the end of the 1970s, the Mother and Child Institute in Bogota, Colombia, was in deep trouble. The institute was the city’s obstetrical reference hospital, where most of the city’s poor women went to give birth. Nurses and doctors were in short supply. In the newly created neonatal intensive care unit, there were so few incubators that premature babies had to share them — sometimes three to an incubator. The crowded conditions spread infections, which are particularly dangerous for preemies. The death rate was high.

In Rey’s system, a mother of a preemie puts the baby on her exposed chest, dressed only in a diaper and sometimes a cap, in an upright or semi-upright position. The baby is strapped in by a scarf or other cloth sling supporting its bottom, and all but its head is covered by mom’s shirt. The mother keeps the baby like that, skin-to-skin, as much as possible, even sleeping in a reclining chair. Fathers and other relatives or friends can wear the baby as well to give the mother a break. Even very premature infants can go home with their families (with regular follow-up visits) once they are stable and their mothers are given training.

Read it.

Comic book supervillains, like real world criminals, often form groups and work together to advance their nefarious schemes.  The Legion of Doom, the Brotherhood of (Evil) Mutants, and the Evil League of Evil are examples of organized supervillain teams.  With organization comes a price, however.  Participating in these groups makes their members more vulnerable to criminal prosecution and civil claims under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO (there are also similar state laws).  But before discussing RICO and its applicability to supervillain teams, let’s first consider why other theories of criminal liability may not be the best fit.

Read it. And watch the video.

One hundred and fifty-one years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, digital creatures have evolved to communicate like fireflies in a computer program that blurs the boundaries of life.

Recorded in line-by-line detail, their development in a software platform called Avida may provide insight into biological behavior and inspiration for the design of distributed computer networks.

“Evolutionary programs have been around for a while, but we haven’t seen them applied to distributed computing,” said computer scientist Philip McKinley of Michigan State University. Synchronized communication can be “seen in the natural world. But in Avida, we can go back to how and why it evolved. We can see the key points that allowed this relatively complex behavior to emerge.”

Speech to the House of Commons 1841.

Can you imagine a modern Congressman making a speech like this?

Can you even think of one that wouldn’t need to have it explained to him in simpler words?

Read it.

Rejection stings, but it’s exactly what Shen wants. He’s on a self-imposed, self-improvement plan to get rejected by a different person every day for a month – a quest to get over his fear of rejection.

It’s all part of the 30-Day Rejection Therapy Challenge – a real-life game created in September by a Canadian Web designer with an anxiety disorder. And it has become a cult phenomenon as the idea spreads through Facebook, Twitter, the Hacker News blog and other social media.

Adherents in New York, Washington, San Francisco, Denmark and Hungary are documenting their denials on Facebook and Twitter. Followers can either buy a deck of cards on the rejectiontherapy.com website with suggested ways to get denied – Invite someone you’ve never socialized with out to dinner, ask someone their political affiliation – or players can come up with ideas on their own.

I’m waiting for the first suicide that can be traced to this game. But that’s me.