Read it.

And they’re doing them in the right order this time.

As a special treat for ‘Firefly’ fans, star of Science Channel’s ‘Sci-Fi Science,’ and the co-founder of string field theory, Dr. Michio Kaku, will be commentating on the science behind ‘Firefly’ for each episode. From terra-forming to anti-matter, Kaku will be explaining why the science fiction featured in the show really isn’t that far from “science fact.”

Read it.

The unidentified protesters flashed the victory sign and shouted “God is Greatest” in Arabic as they were led away.

One protester, giving his name as Sheikh Rooky, told Reuters that the embassy staff are “on the side of the people” and condemn the “massacres happening in Libya” but fear the possible repercussions for speaking out against Gaddafi.

As opposed to the possible repercussions of speaking out for Qaddafi, I presume.

Read it.

The problem with a totally left-wing media is that they try to re-write history to suit their agenda. As a result, we need people to keep the truth alive.

Read it.

George Will celebrates the last American veteran of The Great War.

Buckles never saw combat, but “I saw the results.” He seems vague about only one thing: What was the First World War about?

The First World War was also the first ‘modern war’ in which the government of the United States, under the reins of its most fascist President ever, decided to stick its nose into the sort of conflict that hitherto had been considered solely the business of the Europeans.

On June 28, 1914, an assassin’s bullet in Sarajevo killed the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The war that followed took more than 116,000 American lives — more than all of America’s wars after the Second World War. And in a sense, the First World War took many more American lives because it led to the Second World War and beyond.

Funny how Democrat Presidents seem to have a talent for getting us into these wars and shit. (Republicans are more constrained — ‘kick some wog ass and go home’ is more their style, except we seem to have lost the ability to go home afterward.) Sigh.

Melanie Phillips lays it out.

You really do have to wonder which is the more extreme effect of our politically correct culture — the way in which it brutalises people, or the way it turns them into cerebrally-challenged automatons?

Both attributes were on startling display in the latest piece of advice to emanate from no less august a body than the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

This guidance, intended for all doctors, nurses and counsellors advising women contemplating having an abortion, said such women should be told that terminating a pregnancy was safer than having a baby.

To which one can only ask: safer for whom, precisely? Not for the baby, certainly.

Read it.

‘My hovercraft is full of eels.’ means ‘The revolution starts Wednesday.’ Pass it on.

Read it.

Apparently Eric Hobsbawm is at it again.

It is a deeply puzzling thing.  The grip, that is, of Marxism on the minds of so many evidently intelligent people.  I think I understand the appeal of Marxism on the brain of the early twenty something, having suffered through it, not to mention my poor father, myself.  (That is, he suffered through my infatuation with Marxism.)  But it goes way beyond that. You have to think that if our planet were ever to be discovered by some moderately ethical star faring race, and they were able to appreciate along with everything else the history of communism and all its acolytes, the case against just sterilizing the muddy ball on which we live would be made considerably weaker.  What an appalling, nasty, weak-minded and heartless batch of insects it makes us look. And even that’s unfair to insects — ant colonies work well at least.  They don’t set up little ant gulags.  If the aliens arrive, somebody will have to make sure Hobsbawm STFU.  He merits the dubious distinction of having made scholarship a crime against humanity.

Bryan Caplan has some thoughts on Amy Chua’s less controversial book.

The negative side effect of free-market reforms: The market-dominant minorities disproportionately benefit, increasing popular resentment.  The negative side effect of democratization: Market-dominant minorities disproportionately suffer, because the majority finally gets a chance to legally enforce its resentment.  Pushing both reforms on developing countries simultaneously – which Chua claims the U.S. government habitually does – gives the worst of both worlds: Increasing resentment – and the opportunity to politically act upon it.  If the stars align badly enough, preaching democratic capitalism gives you Yugoslavia or Rwanda.

Read it.

The question then becomes, I guess, why were medieval books the size they were?  And the answer to that is simple: medieval books were the size they were because medieval sheep were the size they were.

Read it.

In the Middle Ages, the Middle East was at the forefront of optics, metallurgy, and mathematics. Its largest cities, libraries, and marketplaces dwarfed those in Europe. Subsequently, over the next half millennium, the Middle East slipped behind Europe in many realms, including science and medicine, finance and business, and literacy and living standards. But just as Confucianism and Taoism could not explain China’s failures, Islam, often blamed for the Middle East’s shortcomings, raises more questions than it answers. If Islam’s supposedly retrograde system of beliefs explains the Middle East’s recent failures, what accounts for its earlier successes?

Until the 1700s, the East and the West remained politically independent of each other, regardless of which side was ahead, and neither side enjoyed unchallenged military supremacy. The last reversal, moreover, had another unique trait: self-reinforcing growth. In both regions, the level of development had been constrained for millennia by the limitations of agrarian life. Since 1700, when world trade fell under European control, the West has developed at a dramatically accelerating rate. Today, its development, as measured by Morris, is over 20 times as high as its 1700 level. The East, with some lag, has also developed to unprecedented heights: Morris calculates its level of development to be about 13 times as high as its record level before 1700.

Read it.

I feel that holiday traditions may, and often do, play a role of some determinative, even normative importance in our lives, whether we realize it or not. Thus there is value in being able conceive of and respond to them distinctly. I feel that way because traditions are deeply associated with many other things I take seriously: local engagement, cultural identity, historical memory, familial attachment, and other “communitarian” goods. These don’t constitute a perfectly indivisible bundle, of course, but “traditionalism” is a thread that runs through them and to a degree connects them. Speaking up for tradition in our economically globalized and hyper-mobile world may be essential to making a case for the communitarian perspective as a whole.

Read it.

Well, that’s the problem with lifetime appointments. The Roman Catholic Church has the same problem.

Read it.

‘Progressives’ and other hipsters want us all to live in dense urban cores. Well, there are problems with that….

Gas forced air is the standard heating solution for new construction in Chicago and much of the Midwest. This may not apply to the largest buildings, but certainly to single family homes and most of the new construction condos in Chicago. Being able to upgrade building systems is key to energy efficiency, because buildings are the number one source of carbon emissions. In the city of Chicago, about 70% of all carbon emissions come from buildings. And while multi-unit buildings may be inherently more efficient in some regards, they create huge challenges for upgrades because of all the shared infrastructure and lack of access to the roof, exterior walls, and utility feeds. This might not apply in some cases where there is, for example, a shared boiler where one upgrade takes care of all units. But for most new construction condos outside of high rises, I strongly suspect they were built without energy efficient furnaces and in a way that effectively precludes upgrading to current technology.

Bryan Caplan dispels some smoke and smudges some mirrors.

What are you morally forbidden to do to a stranger?  You may not murder him.  You may not attack him.  You may not enslave him.  Neither may you rob him.

What are you morally required to do for a stranger?  Not much.  Even if he seems hungry and asks you for food, you’re probably within your rights to refuse.  If you’ve ever been in a large city, you’ve refused to help the homeless on more than one occasion.  And even if you think you broke your moral obligation to give, your moral obligation wasn’t strong enough to let the beggar justifiably mug you.

Notice: These common-sense ethics regarding strangers, ethics that almost everyone admits, are unequivocally libertarian.  Yes, you have an obligation to leave strangers alone, but charity is optional.

One last question: What fraction of your “fellow citizens” have you actually met?  Virtually zero.  The vast majority of your countrymen are, in fact, utter strangers to you.    When you tell your kid “Don’t take rides from strangers,” you don’t make an exception for anyone who happens to share your citizenship.  Modern government – and most of political philosophy – is just a massive effort to pretend otherwise.

Read it.

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

Markets work even when you don’t want them to.

And the frog starts to boil.

Step 1. Come up with some plausible excuse to carve off special lanes for the privileged, even though that increases congestion for everyone else. ‘Oh, we have to have carpool lanes to ecourage people to carpool and so reduce emissions and save the world.’ No mention of the fact that the extra emissions of people crawling along at five or ten miles an hour vastly outpaces any savings from the minuscule number of people who carpool.

Step 2. Don’t mention the fact that Mr Rich Liberal Democrat and his chauffeur can use the carpool lane, as can the sixteen illegal immigrants in a POS van on their way to trim hedges for same, while Joe Sixpack on his way to a construction job site can wave to them while he’s stuck in traffice.

Step 3. Once we’ve got people used to the idea of special privileged lanes, let’s charge people to use them, once again giving the Crust a way to bypass the Great Unwashed while charging people for the use of roads that were built using their tax money.

Sounds like a win-win for the government; the only loser is the ordinary middle-class taxpayer, and who cares about them?

Read it.

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

This has been widely touted as ‘the first time a man has been social secretary’.

I don’t even have to say anything, do I?

Read it.

Zimbabweans are lucky they are no longer suffering under the boot of the racist white former regime Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what kind of hell they would be living in now.

Read it.

I want the Joe Biden map.

Read it.

Apparently, a Seattle area restaurant (right near the airport) has announced that it’s refusing to serve TSA agents in protest of the way the TSA treats passengers who wish to fly.

Now that’s comedy.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, lets loose.

Our nation’s actual military is ahead of VMI in these matters. They are aiming for an organization that exists not to fight wars, still less—heaven forbid!—to win them, but to celebrate diversity.

Most Americans first heard news of this development on November 8, 2009, when General George Casey, reacting to the Fort Hood shooting, told a TV interviewer: “As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” We were further enlightened shortly afterward on learning that Fort Hood, like most US military bases, is a gun-free zone.

Turning military bases into gun-free zones is merely a rest stop along the road to making them testosterone-free zones. That in turn appears to be part of a scheme to fold the military into our culture of grievance, complaint, “rights,” and teeming swarms of lawyers stripping all the sense and virtue from the populace like locusts on wheat. A correspondent who knows the territory tells me: “Guys who served a single tour will get out and join the post office where veterans get very preferential treatment. Then they retire from the post office and head over to the VA claiming service-related handicaps.”

Hey, military men have government jobs, too.

Thomas doesn’t like Bryan Caplan, Scott Sumner, or Will Wikinson very much.

Can’t say that I blame him.

Why should one reject IQ tests as “culturally biased,” and under what conditions? I have no doubt that there is some degree of cultural bias in IQ tests, but so what? As an employer, I may want employees who are not only capable of carrying out certain kinds of mental tasks but who also are attuned to the culture in which I operate my business. If that rules out, say, inner-city blacks who prefer rap to Bach, who wear outré clothing, and who speak a language other than standard English, so be it.

Sumner also “cringes” at “distrust of democracy.” Does he not understand the history of American politics in the twentieth century? It can be summarized, quite accurately, as follows: promise, elect, spend, tax, regulate, promise, elect, spend, tax, regulate, etc., etc., etc.

I can only shake my head in amazement at the delusions of left-libertarians. I must come up with a new name for them, inasmuch as they are not libertarians.

Read it.

Since 2009, Mr. Heicklen has stood there and at courthouse entrances elsewhere and handed out pamphlets encouraging jurors to ignore the law if they disagree with it, and to render verdicts based on conscience.

That concept, called jury nullification, is highly controversial, and courts are hostile to it. But federal prosecutors have now taken the unusual step of having Mr. Heicklen indicted on a charge that his distributing of such pamphlets at the courthouse entrance violates the law against jury tampering.

Arguing about the theory and history of jury nullification provides some of the most entertaining moments in law school.

Read it.

Unpublished Government research suggests the plastic carrier may not be an eco villain after all – but, whisper it, an unsung hero. Hated by environmentalists and shunned by shoppers, the disposable plastic bag is piling up in a shame-filled corner of retail history. But a draft report by the Environment Agency, obtained by the Independent on Sunday, has found that ordinary high density polythene (HDPE) bags used by shops are actually greener than supposedly low impact choices.

Read it.

Just another fine day in the Obamanation.

‘Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ — Benito Mussolini

Read it.

Three ancient monasteries in Egypt are among the oldest continuously functioning Christian religious establishments in the world. Until the recent insurrection and the overthrow of the Mubarak regime, the monasteries could count on the police protection from marauding Muslim zealots and thieves looking for valuable icons.

When civil order vanished from Egypt a few weeks ago, the Copts appealed to the army for protection. They were told that the military could not protect them, that they must protect themselves. And so they did, building protective fences around the monastery.

Unfortunately, it seems the army prefers that the monasteries remain unprotected: on Sunday soldiers with bulldozers arrived and began destroying the fences. Any Copts who attempted to interfere are being shot at by troops.

The notion that change = progress is the chief intellectual deficiency of the Left.

Read it.

Christians, orthodox Jews or anyone with traditional views of sex and marriage should be barred from state university counseling programs unless they agree to violate their beliefs.

That’s the gist of the amicus brief that the ACLU filed on Feb. 11 in a case in which a Christian student is challenging her dismissal from a graduate counseling program at Eastern Michigan University in 2009.

Read it.

Public employee unions, which have become one of the nation’s most aggressive and influential special interest groups in recent decades, are unchecked by the competitive constraints and self-interested ownership that help to balance out private sector unions. In his forthcoming book Special Interest, for instance, Stanford’s Terry Moe points out that the Michigan Education Association has distributed a 40-page instructional manual for local leaders that’s entitled “Electing Your Own Employer, It’s as Easy as 1, 2, 3.” And as one high-ranking state union official told me when I wrote Revolution at the Margins, “We knew the school system wasn’t moving to Mexico,” so there was no reason to work with the state negotiator on establishing a prudent salary structure.

Read it.

Hey, intimidation works.

I don’t give a shit about Libya, either.

Read it.

As much as Americans might complain about rising food prices in the U.S. (even though annual CPI food inflation hasn’t been above 2% for almost two years), we’ve got the most affordable food on the planet as a share of income (see chart above).  And compared to previous years, today’s Americans have the most affordable food in U.S. history (see chart below).

Read it.

Read it.

Because, you know, this is America.

Read it.

Understand, the Left has nothing against rich people participating in politics. Most rich people who are politically active are liberals, and the Democratic Party gets much more of its support from the wealthy than the GOP. George Soros is only the most famous of a battalion of sugar daddies who fund every left-wing cause. But the Left wants a monopoly. They want wealthy people to be barred from political participation unless they toe the liberal line. Hence their increasingly vicious attacks on the Koch brothers; they are trying to make an example of them.

Steve Sailer looks at a Russian program to breed foxes as friendly as dogs.

Read it.

The free iPad app allows doctors to schedule patient appointments, write prescriptions and send them to pharmacies, enable reminders, take clinical notes, access lab results, and input electronic health records. The electronic medical records element is key because the Obama administration is currently offering strong incentives for doctors to start moving their health records online. DrChrono will help doctors start, finish and manage this process.

And DrChono is more than just a simple iPad app. For $99 and up, doctors can upgrade to more storage for records, and complete medical billing. The billing component is another win for doctors, who spend hundreds of dollars each month for medical billing processing. DrChrono’s system integrates with all U.S. insurance companies, even the insurance agents that only use paper billing.

If I were a doctor, I’d be all over this.

Maggie Gallagher lays it out.

The culture war will always be ongoing because the left is never going to stop waging it. You can never “give in” and be done with it — they will simply move on to the next item.

The culture war will never be over because the left will never permit itself to declare victory and stop pushing for more.

Maggie and I were at Yale together; she has always been a fighter.

Read it.

Chemists have found a new way of producing plastic that conducts electricity, potentially paving the way to cheaper, more robust and er, more plasticky computers.

A team led by Professors Paul Meredith and Ben Powell at the University of Queensland, Associate Professor Adam Micolich of the University of New South Wales School of Physics and UNSW doctoral student Andrew Stephenson used an ion beam to “tune” the plastic film.

“In theory, we can make plastics that conduct no electricity at all or as well as metals do – and everything in between,” says Stephenson.

Gotta love Australians.

Jerry Pournelle has some thoughts.

In the United States we are experimenting with the limits of liberal democracy. Elections are unimportant: if the losing side simply refuses to accept the result when they lose, nor limits to their actions when they win, the applicability of the term “democracy” comes into question. Then comes the usual transition from democracy to tyranny: one side refuses to accept the results, chaos emerges, and a friend of the people steps up to restore order. He is given temporary powers. After that the stories divide.

Read it.

As scholars ranging from the liberal political scientist Ira Katznelson to the libertarian legal historian David Bernstein have now documented, organized labor’s rise to power typically came at the expense of black workers. Consider collective bargaining, the legal arrangement whereby a union selected by a majority of employees receives the monopoly bargaining power to exclusively represent all employees. This valuable union tool first became part of federal law under section 7A of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. Since blacks were barred from the vast majority of unions at that time, collective bargaining served as a de facto ban on all black workers in unionized shops.

‘Progressives’ do many historically odd things, such as the embrace of the Democratic Party, which was the party of slavery from Andy Jackson’s time up through the Civil War, and the party of Jim Crow from the Civil War up through LBJ.

The Other McCain must spend most of his time laughing.

The Lara Logan story proves to be the gift that keeps on giving, thanks to a predictable pattern: Someone attempts a reaction more complex than “rape is bad,” and immediately gets shouted down by angry feminists.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Read it.

The other day I needed to go to the emergency room. Not wanting to sit there for 4 hours, I put on my Magic Green Hat. When I went into the E.R., I noticed that 3/4 of the people got up and left.

I guess they decided that they weren’t that sick after all. Cut at least 3 hours off my waiting time.

Need help at the Emergency Room? Don’t want to wait six hours to see somebody? No problem! Wear the Magic Green Border Patrol Hat.

It also works at DMV. It saved me 5 hours.

At the Laundromat, three minutes after entering, I had my choice of any machine, most still running.

If you live in Texas, it might cut your wait time at the grocery store.

Read it.

A clever idea. Famous person reads e-book, makes marginal notes, sells marginal notes as an add-on to the e-book. This will, of course, require standards so that the notes will dependably attach to the book, but it’s an interesting thought.

This has actually been used in times past. I believe that most editions of the Talmud include the text along with first, second, and perhaps even third-generation glosses. I once saw a printed copy of the Seanchas Mor
in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library that had a similar format: Old Irish Text, Latin glosses on the text, and Middle Irish notations on the Latin glosses.

Gary Taubes does diet. Somewhat old but still interesting.

America has become weirdly polarized on the subject of weight. On the one hand, we’ve been told with almost religious certainty by everyone from the surgeon general on down, and we have come to believe with almost religious certainty, that obesity is caused by the excessive consumption of fat, and that if we eat less fat we will lose weight and live longer. On the other, we have the ever-resilient message of Atkins and decades’ worth of best-selling diet books, including ”The Zone,” ”Sugar Busters” and ”Protein Power” to name a few. All push some variation of what scientists would call the alternative hypothesis: it’s not the fat that makes us fat, but the carbohydrates, and if we eat less carbohydrates we will lose weight and live longer.

What’s forgotten in the current controversy is that the low-fat dogma itself is only about 25 years old. Until the late 70’s, the accepted wisdom was that fat and protein protected against overeating by making you sated, and that carbohydrates made you fat. In ”The Physiology of Taste,” for instance, an 1825 discourse considered among the most famous books ever written about food, the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin says that he could easily identify the causes of obesity after 30 years of listening to one ”stout party” after another proclaiming the joys of bread, rice and (from a ”particularly stout party”) potatoes. Brillat-Savarin described the roots of obesity as a natural predisposition conjuncted with the ”floury and feculent substances which man makes the prime ingredients of his daily nourishment.” He added that the effects of this fecula — i.e., ”potatoes, grain or any kind of flour” — were seen sooner when sugar was added to the diet.

If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion that you can eat lard straight from the can and conceivably reduce your risk of heart disease.

David Ludwig, the Harvard endocrinologist, says that it’s the direct effect of insulin on blood sugar that does the trick. He notes that when diabetics get too much insulin, their blood sugar drops and they get ravenously hungry. They gain weight because they eat more, and the insulin promotes fat deposition. The same happens with lab animals. This, he says, is effectively what happens when we eat carbohydrates — in particular sugar and starches like potatoes and rice, or anything made from flour, like a slice of white bread. These are known in the jargon as high-glycemic-index carbohydrates, which means they are absorbed quickly into the blood. As a result, they cause a spike of blood sugar and a surge of insulin within minutes. The resulting rush of insulin stores the blood sugar away and a few hours later, your blood sugar is lower than it was before you ate. As Ludwig explains, your body effectively thinks it has run out of fuel, but the insulin is still high enough to prevent you from burning your own fat. The result is hunger and a craving for more carbohydrates. It’s another vicious circle, and another situation ripe for obesity.

Read it.

Read it.

Finally, if you have teenagers or preteens, or if you are a teenager, open yourself to a new possibility. People say that the reason teenagers are so hard to get along with is that that stage “is part of growing up.” But, then, why don’t teenagers have the same problems when they work at a summer job or a part-time job during the school year? They are exposed to lots of people, often within a wide age range, but they aren’t treated cruelly, and they don’t treat others cruelly, nearly as frequently. Could their better attitude be the result of three facts: they are free to quit that job; the other people at the job typically want to be there; and there’s not as much time for cruelty when you’re trying to be productive? Teenagers treating other teenagers cruelly is part of growing up?when compulsory schooling is part of growing up.

Considering the ‘socialization’ I observed in elementary school and high school, I think that most children would be better off without it. After all, the term ‘schoolyard bully’ exists for a reason.

Thomas at Politics and Prosperity apparently has similar memories.

They remind me, too much, of the public schools of my own youth. I would have given anything to have been placed in an environment where the emphasis was on learning, not on suffering through hours, days, months, and years of classes with packs of pre-adolescent and adolescent animals.

Read it.

Scientists have identified a new species of Early Cretaceous sauropod – a six-tonne beast with a fearsome set of rear legs which have prompted paleontologists to dub it “thunder-thighs”.

“If predators came after it, it would have been able to boot them out of the way.”

Read it.

Warning

This morning the Muslim Brotherhood warned the United States that if the United States meddling in Egypt continued, they intend to cut off America’s supply of 7-11 and Motel 6 managers.

If this action does not yield sufficient results, cab drivers will be next, followed by Dell, AT&T and AOL customer service reps.

Finally, if all else fails, they have threatened not to send us any more presidents either. It’s gonna get ugly.

Read it.

Cornish food manufacturers have won a nine-year battle to win special protection for their most famous snack, banning any products made in Devon, Wales or the rest of Britain from being called Cornish pasties.

And, perhaps, relieving those outside of Cornwall from any necessity of eating them.