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Michael Allison, a 41-year-old backyard mechanic from southeastern Illinois, faces up to 75 years in prison for an act most people don’t realize is a crime: recording public officials.

Allison’s predicament is an extreme example of a growing and disturbing trend. As citizens increase their scrutiny of law enforcement officials through technologies such as cell phones, miniature cameras, and devices that wirelessly connect to video-sharing sites such as YouTube and LiveLeak, the cops are increasingly fighting back with force and even jail time—and not just in Illinois. Police across the country are using decades-old wiretapping statutes that did not anticipate iPhones or Droids, combined with broadly written laws against obstructing or interfering with law enforcement, to arrest people who point microphones or video cameras at them. Even in the wake of gross injustices, state legislatures have largely neglected the issue. Meanwhile, technology is enabling the kind of widely distributed citizen documentation that until recently only spy novelists dreamed of. The result is a legal mess of outdated, loosely interpreted statutes and piecemeal court opinions that leave both cops and citizens unsure of when recording becomes a crime.

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Because you just don’t have anything more important to do today.

Watch it.

Blue states just can’t seem to do anything right.

The Other McCain has the goods.

Anyone offended by a video that showed “a scene of ants crawling on a crucifix” as a metaphor for AIDS — for this is what David Wojnarowicz’s video showed — is obviously an intolerant bigot. And wherever bigotry rears its ugly head, Frank Rich will courageously Speak Truth to Power. Or at least write 1,536 words to power….

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With the exception of, perhaps, Texas governor Rick Perry, no public official wants to publicly admit an obvious fact: The United States of America will likely be forced to invade Mexico. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.  The question then becomes: What to do with Mexico after we invade it and wipe out the drug cartels (as much as can be). Does the United States merely return Mexico to a nation state of corrupt politicians, failed economic policies, and lawlessness, or do we annex Mexico and turn it into the 51st state?

The Mexican government has, so far, been unable to curtail the violence and it is likely that, without intervention, the country will become far more deadly than Afghanistan prior to 9/11. Worse, Islamic terrorists have been long suspected of using Mexico as a gateway into the U.S.

He that hath an ear to hear, let him hear.

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The fragment, believed to be from a human finger, was found on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited island in the southwest Pacific, Discovery News reported.

Researchers investigating Earhart’s disappearance found the fragment of bone in June 2009 along with pieces of a pocketknife, prewar American bottles and makeup from a woman’s compact.

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These numbers are big enough that we’re not seeing a clsuter of arty comp lit major-novelist-waiters picking up some cash while living their dream in a garret. The stats show people who probably wouldn’t have gone to college in another era, responded to incentives like cheap loans and went to college in the ’90s or ’00s, graduated at 22- or 23-years-old, and then got the same gigs they would have been qualified for at 18.

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The European Commission has been condemned for spending three million euros hosting a lavish anti-poverty development conference for 6,000 people in Brussels.

It’s all about the Crust.

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

You may ask: How can a whole city sink in Wisconsin? Well, read the book and find out.

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Would that our political institutions were so resilient.

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In a society hypersensitive about gender issues to the point of psychosis, a rape accusation is perhaps the worst claim you could lodge against someone short of adding that their victim was underage. But although certain gender-crazed pompom girls insist that false rape accusations are a vicious patriarchal fiction, by one estimate about half of all official rape complaints are entirely fabricated. Merely searching the word “false” alongside “rape” on Google News will yield a fresh crop of verifiably bogus allegations nationwide with each new sunrise. Try it if you don’t believe me.

At around 2 p.m. on August 20th, Wilen and Ardin walked together into a Stockholm police station. Both women told police of how Assange had, against their expressed wishes, ridden their naked golden haunches bareback and rubber-free. They both said they were alarmed about possibly having contracted STDs from him but that he’d refused their requests to be tested.

Oops.

Did you catch that? For both girls it was consensual, but suddenly it wasn’t consensual, but he wasn’t violent, but then again he wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, but neither of them are afraid of him, anyway, even though he’s twisted.

Assange now faces charges in Sweden for what is legally known there as “sex by surprise.”

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

Following in such unimpeachable footsteps, Ardin once reportedly filed a sexual-harassment complaint against another student for looking at his notes and not paying attention to her—while she was apparently giving a lecture on sexual harassment!—and thus using “male suppression techniques” to make her feel inferior and unwanted. When the male student learned of the complaint, he apologized to Ardin, who filed a NEW harassment complaint arising from his apology.

‘Oh brave new world, that has such people in’t!’

Whether or not he was set up, and whether or not it was the CIA, doesn’t seem all that important to me. One would think that a globetrotting David seeking to slay the American Goliath would have the good sense to keep his dick in his pants. But in this case, he apparently made the mistake of penetrating a radical feminist seeking to bring the patriarchy to its knees.

The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley;
And that is why wise men don’t leave their dicks astray.

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An acclaimed outdoorsman who wrote movingly about testing himself against nature is presumed to have died after a crocodile snatched him from his kayak while he led an American expedition from the source of the White Nile into the heart of Congo.

Think of it as evolution in action. The SWPL gene is a prime target for Natural Selection, that’s clear.

“He also had a fantastic social conscience,” he said, explaining that Coetzee ran kayak trips for underprivileged kids in Sudan. “He was one of those people that would look after others not only in a physical sense but also nurture them spiritually and mentally.”

Oh, yeah, that’s the first thing what occurs to me when I look for something to benefit underprivileged kids in the Sudan — kayak trips! It’s so obvious!

I’d like to see a shark get one, just to drive the point home. Or maybe a polar bear.

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What this article and others like it don’t tell you is that we are witnessing one of those watershed moments in history: Ivory Coast is about to toggle from a (mostly) Christian country to a Muslim country. The winner of the election is a Muslim — the head of the Muslim rebel forces in the north of the country — and the loser is a non-Muslim. Ivory Coast is on the verge of officially joining the Ummah.

The report below cites the surge of illegal immigrants from Ivory Coast’s Muslim neighbors as the cause of Mr. Ouattara’s victory. However, Ivory Coast is already a member of the OIC, and as of the 2004 figures in my database, it had a population of 17,298,040, with 6,677,043 Muslims. That’s 38.6%, which is already past the point where you would expect the imposition of sharia. What is happening now is simply the formal handing-over of the keys.

Muslims do not need to be in the majority to force Islamic rule on a country. They simply need to be present in numbers sufficient to terrorize, threaten, bribe, and defraud their way into power. The exact percentage varies according to circumstances, but absent intervention from an external force, full Islamization can be expected by the time a country becomes 40% Muslim.

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However, once I got used to it and resigned myself, it was great. Even though I knew I had a worrying illness, I was happy as a pig in mud. I no longer had the arrogance of being frustrated with slow people, I abandoned many projects which reduced a lot of stress, I could enjoy films without knowing what would happen (my nickname before this used to be ‘comic book guy’ if you get the reference), and I became amazingly laid back and happy go lucky. I got on with people much better. I developed much more respect for one of my friends in particular who I always considered slow – it turned out he is much deeper than I thought, I just never had the patience to notice before. You could say I had more time to look around. The world just made more sense. The only negative, apart from struggling to perform at work, and having to write everything down, was that I no longer found sci-fi interesting – it just didn’t seem important. (I’m not joking, although it sounds like a cliché.)

Fortunately this person doesn’t appear to have been greedy and dishonest as well, otherwise the pressure to run for Congress would have been irresistible.

The Washington Post, of course.

But some, like David Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992 at the age of 37, used art to keep a grip on the world. He was the quintessential East Village figure, a bit of a loner, a bit crazy, ferociously brilliant and anarchic. He was a self-educated dropout who made art on garbage can lids, who painted inside the West Side piers where men met for anonymous sex, who pressed friends into lookout duty while he covered the walls of New York with graffiti. In 1987, his former lover and best friend, Peter Hujar, died of complications from AIDS, and Wojnarowicz learned that he, too, was infected with HIV.

In other words, a bum who lived as a parasite on society and his fellow man. The saddest thing about his story is the willingness of the Crust to consider this abject failure to be, in their eyes, some sort of success.

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The 1860 Census was the last time the federal government took a count of the South’s vast slave population. Several months later, in the summer of 1861, the United States Coast Survey—arguably the most important scientific agency in the nation at the time—issued two maps of slavery that drew on the Census data, the first of Virginia and the second of Southern states as a whole. Though many Americans knew that dependence on slave labor varied throughout the South, these maps uniquely captured the complexity of the institution and struck a chord with a public hungry for information about the rebellion.

The biter bit.

Let’s face it, with a name like ‘Winkevoss’ you’re going to lead an interesting life whether you want it or not.

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The research, reported in the Journal of Experimental Biology, shows that Argentine ants (Linepithema humile), do not just retrace their steps when presented with a barrier — as might be expected. Instead, the ants begin a localized search that seems to take into account the direction in which they were planning to go. Because there are many network-management programs that mimic the search behaviour of this ant species, systems engineers are taking notice and wondering what they can learn.

‘Experimental biology’ sounds like a great field in which to be.

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So if one part is ruled unconstitutional, the whole thing falls down.

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Chicago insists a legal weapon permit holder must have a signed affidavit from a firearms instructor affirming that he or she completed a training course, including at least one hour of gun range training. Chicago simultaneously prevents its residents from meeting that criterion in the city they live in. Yes, that’s right: The city demands gun range training to own a gun yet bans gun ranges at the same time. Well, not all gun ranges. The already existing ranges for government employees at the local Postal Service, Federal Reserve (!), and border authority offices are still in business.

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As gubernatorial candidates, Republicans Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio campaigned hard against federal stimulus money for high-speed rail projects in their states, dismissing it as useless big-government spending that would cost their states much more in the long run than the job gains they’d see in the short run.

Both men won. Today, they faced the consequences.

The Department of Transportation yanked $1.2 billion from Wisconsin and Ohio high-speed rail efforts and redirected it to other states that want to move forward, especially California, which got half that money, $624 million. Unlike the voters of those two Midwestern states, Californians elected a Democrat, Jerry Brown, as their next governor.

You cross the Big Boys, they punish you.

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[E]ach unit has “a complex internal structure whose large internal surface area efficiently conditions air passing through it by evaporative cooling. Each cooling tower is made from 3D-printed sand using technology developed by D-Shape.”

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Today Susan Collins continued her career long practice of duplicity by reneging on her agreement with her caucus and voting for cloture on the pressing subject of legalizing buggery in the Armed Forces. A vote that failed.

The problem with our moderates is not only that they don’t believe in anything not even in the sanctity of their own pledge to their caucus.

That’s what being a RINO is all about: A Democrat in a Clever Plastic Disguise who gets to pretend to be a Republican in public, being sure of a welcome from those idiots in the Republican party who think that labels actually determine the nature of a thing rather than the other way around. The people who need to be expunged are not the RINOs but those ‘pragmatists’ who tolerate them.

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If even Slate magazine sees it as a problem, you know it’s really a problem.

This immense imbalance has political consequences. When President Obama appears Wednesday on Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters (9 p.m. ET), he will be there not just to encourage youngsters to do their science homework but also to reinforce the idea that Democrats are the party of science and rationality. And why not? Most scientists are already on his side. Imagine if George W. Bush had tried such a stunt—every major newspaper in the country would have run an op-ed piece by some Nobel Prize winner asking how the guy who prohibited stem-cell research and denied climate change could have the gall to appear on a program that extols the power of scientific thinking.

Indeed. The Left prides itself on being the smartest guys in the room, even while embracing obvious loonies like environmentalists and animal-rights wackos.

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Note the assumption in the headline that a sit-in is somehow not a crime — which it most definitely is.

For some reason we have become desensitized to levels of street violence that in the Good Old Days would have brought ‘a whiff of grapeshot’ response. The U.S. Constitution gives the right of assembly but specifies ‘peaceably’; once it stops being peaceable, it stops being a right.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Bryan Caplan points out that, yes, Jonah is a really good writer.

Paul Carr at TechCrunch has an unconventional perspective.

Both the Pentagon Papers and Watergate involved scandalous information that almost nobody knew. “Cablegate”, on the other hand, involved cables that were routinely shared between members of the US government and armed forces, and trusted figures from friendly nations.

Thousands – maybe millions – of people had access to the cables – which, as openness goes, is pretty impressive. Hell, even a lowly Private like Bradley Manning – the junior soldier with a grudge against the American military who allegedly leaked the documents to Wikileaks – had access to them. Now, however, thanks to Wikileaks, all of that is likely to stop. What’s also likely to stop is the routine documenting of casual conversations, the candid sharing of opinions between allies – and a whole bunch of other acts of openness which if Wikileaks actually meant a word it said, the organisation should be all for. And for… what? So that millions of us who had no real business – beyond a basic prurient interest – in knowing what conversations are being had behind closed diplomatic doors could feel important. Well, great. Responsible openness’ loss is a few million busybodies’ gain.

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It’s been called the “warrior gene” – a mutation that seems to make people more aggressive. Now researchers report that people with this gene may not be aggressive, just better at spotting their own interests.

I think it is safe to say that Barack Obama does not have this gene.

Katherine Mangu-Ward points the finger.

Always intrepid, conservative Republicans are shrugging off the angry ghost of Newt and getting into the dirty business of redefining the word earmark in order to keep the cash flowing.

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To quote George Carlin: ‘If you nail together two things that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck will buy it.’

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Science is about understanding the origins, nature, and behavior of the universe and all it contains; engineering is about solving problems by rearranging the stuff of the world to make new things. Conflating these separate objectives leads to uninformed opinions, which in turn can delay or misdirect management, effort, and resources.

In short: Engineers build useful stuff. Scientists don’t.

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This actually says something very profound. The one who is ‘challenging socially-constructed hair norms’ is, in technical terms, a ‘dork’. Norms exist for a reason. Those who ‘challenge’ them aren’t being bold and independent, they’re being sociopathic. Like tattoos and piercings, they make a fashion statement: ‘I’m on the lunatic fringe, and I intend remaining on the lunatic fringe. Feel free to ignore me, unless I’m in a group, in which case I represent an algae bloom in the gene pool’.

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More hand-wringing about the disappearance of things of no possible interest to anyone whose academic career didn’t depend on it.

Tom Smith at The Right Coast spanks MoDo big-time.

Poor Maureen.  She could spend a whole day getting gussied up and she still wouldn’t look half as good as Sarah does in camos.  I watched the episode of Sarah Palin’s Alaska Ms. Dowd discusses here and she shockingly misrepresents it.  Palin switched rifles after a miss but as a subsequent test suggested, the sights on the first weapon were off.  She killed the caribou with a good, clean shot. I actually agree with Dowd that the suggestion in the show that hunting on the tundra is a practical way to harvest meat is somewhat misleading, but it’s not misleading at all to suggest it’s great recreation, a way to reconnect with family and you get some meat into the bargain.  I would love to go on such a trip.  Unless Dowd is suggesting we all give up eating meat, there’s nothing wrong with shooting caribou and eating them.  Dowd indulges in poor wittle Bambi fallacy as if her steak tartar comes from the meat fairy.  By contrast, we saw a lot of butchering of the Palins’ kill, a lot more than you usually see on hunting shows.  There are positively swarms of caribou on the arctic tundra and everything else up there, bears, wolves, skeeters, you name it, eats them, so why shouldn’t the Palins.  This is not shooting rhinos for their horns or something.

Maureen Dowd is one of a stable of New York Times writers who seem to have only two columns, one that says ‘I hate Sarah Palin!’ and one that says ‘I hate George W Bush!’, and they keep phoning in versions of those two as long as the Times is willing to pay for it. (Well, actually, to be fair, they have a handful of black writers who have a third column that says ‘You’re all racists out there!’)

Russ Roberts makes some good points.

People argue that we should raise taxes on the rich because they have gained x% of the increase in income since 1980. There is no “they” there. The people who were in the top 1% today are not the same people who were there in 1980. Some of them are dead. Some dropped out of the top 1% because they made bad decisions or had bad luck. Some of the top 1% today were not there ten or twenty years ago. Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded Google. They were not in the top 1% in 1980. They were 7 years old. Their parents as far as I can tell were not in the top 1%. Now they’re both very wealthy because they created something that is gloriously pleasant in our lives. Thank you, gents. Some who were in the top 1% are still in the top 1% and received a lot of income and wealth by making great products are providing great services. Bill Belichick might be in that group. In 1980 he was an assistant coach for the New York Giants. He was probably very well paid. Now he makes a lot more as head coach of the New England Patriots. Congrats, Bill, on your commitment to excellence and your success. And some in the top 1% were there in 1980 and are still there because they feed at the great rent-seeking trough. Wall Street, please get a life like the rest of us where bad financial decisions have consequences.

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The free market works, even when you don’t want it to.

Over at the White House, a farmers’ market has sprouted, a garden has been cultivated and holiday guests are being offered poached fruit. But the area surrounding the Capitol is awash in milkshakes, grilled cheese sandwiches and mildly baroque pizza.

That’s because the White House is out of touch with Real America. Duh.

Mr. Mendelsohn has worked with Michelle Obama extensively on her anti-obesity campaign. But that didn’t stop him from starting a Capitol Hill-area burger spot, Good Stuff Eatery, and We, The Pizza, which opened four months ago.

Heh.

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No doubt Thomas Friedman, famous New York Times columnist, is standing by to cheer them on. After all, the Chinese know so much more about democracy and good government than Americans do.

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Shocking I know. But it does illustrate that Friedman thinks the Communist Chinese as clueless about America as he has so often demonstrated himself to be.

Consider the following gem:

Americans just had what they call an “election.” Best we could tell it involved one congressman trying to raise more money than the other (all from businesses they are supposed to be regulating) so he could tell bigger lies on TV more often about the other guy before the other guy could do it to him. This leaves us relieved. It means America will do nothing serious to fix its structural problems: a ballooning deficit, declining educational performance, crumbling infrastructure and diminished immigration of new talent.

Of course, it wouldn’t surprise a Normal Intelligent Adult that a Chinese Communist functionary wouldn’t recognize an election — after all, they dispensed with such nonsense long ago — but it apparently surprises Friedman?

And why not? Friedman wouldn’t recognize an election if it bit him on the butt, as this literary conceit demonstrates plainly.

His affection for the Communist Chinese viewpoint apparently keeps him from realizing that if the Congressmen in question didn’t have their regulatory hands on the throats of American business, then American business would not be paying them money, nor would the Congressmen in question be in a position to persuade them to do so.

No apparent recognition of the fact that, of all the liars in Congress, the highest percentage of them belong to the party that he supports, votes for, and keeps trying to push farther toward the Communist Chinese point of view. (The Communist Chinese, of course, are world-famous for their truth-telling at all costs.)

And, of course, a Normal Intelligent Adult would point out that the structural problems Ballooning Deficit and Declining Educational Performance are the direct consequence of people like Friedman being in control of the levers of power, that Crumbling Infrastructure is a direct consequence of the fact that people who build roads (and people who pay for them) are required to pay confiscatory Union rates by the very same sort of politician that Friedman would vote for (Democrat), and that Declining Immigration of New Talent doesn’t hold a candle to the problem of Increasing Immigation of Illegal Refugees From the Mexican Drug Wars.

But, then, a Normal Intelligent Adult really has no incentive to interact with Friedman at all; talking to a post would be so much more productive.

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In what Japan said was an unprecedented show of force two ‘submarine hunter’ Ilyushin-38 jets from Russia’s Pacific Fleet circled the biggest joint US-Japanese military exercise in history for several hours in an apparent attempt to gather intelligence.

Memo to the Crust: Just because they aren’t (formally) Communists any more doesn’t mean that they’re our friends.

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Certainly that’s how it turned out after this year’s general election in Australia. That resulted, as over here, in a hung parliament, the first for more than 70 years. As here, the incumbent Labour Party lost the vote by most meaningful measurements (they ended up with the same number of seats as their conservative rivals, and under Australia’s version of the AV system a considerably smaller share of first preferences). The three independent MPs who found themselves kingmakers all came from rural constituencies, whose electors appeared much happier with the idea of a centre-right government than a centre-left one. But that did not stop two of the three from throwing in their lot with Labour, allowing the seemingly humiliated Julia Gillard to remain as prime minister. The rationale was straightforward: they were able to get more out of her, in the form of money, jobs and all the other little titbits of power that a government has at its disposal. They also believed that her relative weakness made her a more trustworthy partner: she was less likely to cut and run, because she had much more reason to be frightened of the voters. And luckily, being politicians (and Australians), they seem to have been unembarrassable.

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Nothing brings back the sixties like students getting kicked away from the public trough.

The occupation began at a ‘What Next?’ meeting on the day of the second student march when a group of UCL students voted to take over the Jeremy Bentham Room (students at SOAS had gone into occupation two days before). A general meeting was then held to draft their demands. The most important, and most often repeated, is that UCL’s management issue a statement ‘condemning all cuts to higher education’. They also want things they might be able to get: for the university to pay UCL cleaners the London living wage, to bring outsourced support staff in-house and to change the composition of the university council to get rid of the majority of corporate, non-UCL members (they’d like a quarter each of management, students, tutors and support staff). Decisions are made by consensus – ‘better than democracy’ a first-year undergraduate explained – at two lengthy daily meetings. Students are divided into working groups according to their talents – IT, media, process (analysis of how the occupation itself is working) – but there’s no leader, everyone insisted. An email account, Facebook page, website and Twitter feed were set up overnight and messages of support started to come in from people like Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky and Billy Bragg; comedians came to tell jokes, bands to play, novelists to read their books, tutors to give seminars. On 29 November, the day before the third march, they sent a delegation to protest outside the Oxford Circus Topshop about Philip Green’s alleged tax evasion. And on the day of the march itself, another delegation was sent to Trafalgar Square, while tweeters back at the occupation offered tea and biscuits to anyone running away from the police.

I wonder how they would cope if they were just left to sit and rot for a year or two? It’s not as if anybody needs them or their campus buildings. They might even serve as a tourist attraction. ‘Come see the student demonstrators! Like Madame Tussaud’s, only they move and smell bad!’

For Professionals Only.

Makes Congress look like a kindergarten recess.

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Yeah, that’s really effective advertising, all right. Makes me want to rush right out and buy one.

Not.

Proof positive that environmentalism is just some wierdo pagan religion.

Does this raise your consciousness about how mankind is harming the planet? Or does it just creep you out? We report, you decide.

Check it out.

We have the technology.

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Nearly one in four terrorists released from the detention facility at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, resumed terrorist activities against the United States and the number is expected to rise, according to a report to Congress by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI).

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

Read it.

Gosh, I wonder who might want to do that?

The Other McCain sometimes points and laughs.

Before we go wading into that troll-infested argument, however, let’s pause to consider a remarkable fact: Interpol is now issuing warrants for men who fail to wear condoms.

Perhaps Julian Assange should convert to Catholicism and ask the Pope to testify on his behalf.