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The parents of a dead Israeli man have launched a legal action in the hope that a court will let them use his frozen sperm so that they can have a grandchild.

I can’t see how anybody could have a problem with this.

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An Australian teenager has died after he fell from a multi-storey car park while typing a text message.

19-year-old Ryan Robbins escorted a couple of women to their car late last Friday, in Melbourne. After they parted ways, Ryan began texting a friend, while walking.

He did not notice the railing – about waist-high – and tripped over, plunging to his death. Ryan had been drinking but was not drunk, according to his grandmother Patricia Schroeter.

Think of it as evolution in action. And, of course

In an interview with the radio station 3AW, she blamed inadequate safety measures at the car park for Ryan’s death and called for taller barriers to be mandatory.

“I don’t want anyone else to lose their children or… to go like this, not if it can be prevented,” she said.

Teaching the kid to be NOT QUITE SO CLUELESS is apparently off the table.

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James Hobbs was attacked in Highbridge on 15 January after he popped out to Tasty Bitez for some meaty goodness. He suffered a deep cut across the throat, but “held the wrapped £3.40 takeaway to his neck for several minutes” until his cousin could provide a towel to stem the flow of blood.

Be prepared.

And don’t get.

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President Obama’s Chamber of Commerce speech singling out GE, Dow, Whirlpool, and Caterpillar for praise got me thinking: What if there were some way to invest in companies that have a close relationship to the Obama administration?

Would this be a money-making proposition, allowing an investor a piece of the upside as the companies use the power of the government to their advantage? Or would it be a money-losing proposition, because the companies whose CEOs are spending their time cultivating government relationships are doing so only as a desperate tactic because their firms are otherwise unable to compete successfully in the marketplace on the basis of the value they offer their customers?

Don’t think of it as selling out — think of it as buying in.

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Witches could soon be required to get a permit under proposed Romania legislation which would make it possible to fine or even imprison one whose predictions turn out to be false.

And God forbid they should put clocks back an hour in winter.

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Russia will from next autumn stop putting its clocks back in the winter, because it is causing people “stress and illness” according to Dmitry Medvedev.

You know it’s bad when Russians are more sensible than we are.

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Preparing for the jobs of tomorrow?

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Liberals — particularly in academia and the social sciences — have a tribal mentality which results in discrimination against conservatives.

What is shocking is not that such tribal mentality exists, but that anyone is expressing surprise.

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A former Army bomb disposal expert tried to murder his pregnant wife by planting a hand grenade in her car after she confronted him about an affair, a court heard yesterday.

And they always told me that skills learned in the military weren’t transferable to civilian life.

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A game developed by a Boston-based tech company that allows users to drive a truck full of immigrants through the desert and try not to have them tossed out is drawing fire from some immigrant advocates.

Smuggle Truck: Operation Immigration, a proposed iPhone and iPad app by Owlchemy Labs targeted for release in March, lets players navigate through what appears to be the U.S-Mexican border.

As the truck drives over cliffs, mountains and dead animals, immigrants fall off the truck’s bed. Scores are calculated by the number of immigrants helped across the border.

Actually, I can’t think of anything more American.

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The Verizon iPhone 4 contains a radio chip capable of connecting to both CDMA and to GSM networks, a detailed autopsy of the device has revealed.

The take-apart was conducted by iFixit.com and exposed the presence of Qualcomm’s MDM6600 chip, a part that supports both types of cellular technology when connected to appropriate antennae.

Naturally, the Veriphone’s integrated aerial is tuned to CDMA, but there’s technically nothing to stop Apple incorporating a second, GSM-tuned antenna too, allowing it to produce a single handset capable of connecting to either network.

Oh ho ho….

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Don’t blame them. Inventory is much easier when it’s bits on a server rather than boxes on a shelf.

Oh, hey, wow, maybe we could do that with books….

(I’m REALLY glad I own Apple stock.)

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These days, growing numbers of young Swedes about to marry are not only choosing flatware patterns but also picking new names. Sometimes it is an older family name; more often it is one they simply concoct.

Mr. Ekengren recalled a case a few years ago in which an immigrant family requested permission to be called Mohammedsson.

“Permission was granted,” he said.

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Obama lied? Say in ain’t so.

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Arianna came up with a great business model.  Create a place where liberals could tell each other how smart they were, where they could write blog posts without being paid, and where they could create a community of commenters who routinely attacked the evil Republicans…

and then sell out for mucho dinero.

Is this a great country, or what?

The biter bit.

Those who live by progressivism die by progressivism.

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Rudolph P. Byrd is a professor of African-American studies and founding director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a professor of African and African American studies and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University.

And both are, evidently, explicit racists, subscribing to the ‘one drop of blood’ theory.

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Consider the Commando Solo, the Air Force’s airborne broadcasting center. A revamped cargo plane, the Commando Solo beams out psychological operations in AM and FM for radio, and UHF and VHF for TV. Arquilla doesn’t want to go into detail how the classified plane could get a denied internet up and running again, but if it flies over a bandwidth-denied area, suddenly your Wi-Fi bars will go back up to full strength.

We have the technology.

Then there are cell towers in the sky. The military already uses its aircraft as communications relays in places like Afghanistan. Some companies are figuring out upgrades: FastCom, an effort led by the defense firm Textron, is a project that hooks up cellular pods to the belly of a drone, the better to keep cellular and data connections in the air without pilot fatigue. Underneath the drones, a radius of a few kilometers on the ground would have 3G coverage.

We have ways to make you tweet….

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China has secretly built a concrete aircraft carrier for pilot training as part of its military build-up, intelligence sources have disclosed.

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It has become a symbol of conformity. “Suit” was the chosen insult of hippies to describe a dull establishment man. The garment has been ostentatiously rejected by Silicon Valley titans like Steve Jobs of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Sergey Brin of Google. Yet the business suit has an exciting and mysterious history that should give wearers a tingle of pleasure every time they put one on. It is a garment born out of revolution, warfare and pestilence. The suit still bears the marks of this turbulent past as well as the influence of Enlightenment thinking, sporting pursuits and a Regency dandy. In the year that may well mark the 150th anniversary of the suit it seems a shame that no celebrations were held in its honour.

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More hand-wringing from the New York Times.

Species die. It has become a catastrophic fact of modern life. On our present course, by E.O. Wilson’s estimate, half of all plant and animal species could be extinct by 2100 — that is, within the lifetime of a child born today. Kenya stands to lose its lions within 20 years. India is finishing off its tigers. Deforestation everywhere means that thousands of species too small or obscure to be kept on life support in a zoo simply vanish each year.

The only species whose extinction I am not prepared to tolerate is my own. In that I suspect I am differ from most environmentalists.

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I count libertarians as part of the right because libertarians’ anti-statist views are aligned with the views of the traditional (small-government) conservatives who are usually Republicans. Having said that, the results reported in “IQ and Politics” lead me to suspect that the right is smarter than the left, left-wing propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding. There is additional evidence for my view.

Those who self-identify as persons of the right are 15% more likely to qualify for membership in Mensa than those who self-identify as persons of the left. This result is plausible because it is consistent with the pronounced anti-government tendencies of the very-high-IQ members of the Triple Nine Society (see “IQ and Politics”).

Idealists (“liberals”) are bound to be less happy than realists (conservatives and libertarians) because idealists’ expectations about human accomplishments (aided by government) are higher than those of realists, and so idealists are doomed to disappointment.

If you are very intelligent — with an IQ that puts you in the top 2% of the population — you are most likely to be an INTJ, INTP, ENTJ, ENTP, or INFJ, in that order. Your politics will lean heavily toward libertarianism or small-government conservatism. You probably vote Republican most of the time because, even if you are not a card-carrying Republican, you are a staunch anti-Democrat. And you are a happy person because your expectations are not constantly defeated by reality.

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I enter into conversations with unsuspecting men sitting next to me on airplanes, on the subway and in coffee shops and give them a chance to share their innermost thoughts anonymously. My goal is to dig out the inner, unspoken perceptions that affect women every day in the workplace and at home.

The interesting thing is that I can’s see a man caring about such information regarding women.

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There’s nothing really new when it comes to guns.

Guns were the software of the 19th century; the most dynamic age of development was roughly 1870 to 1900, when the modern forms were perfected. Two primary operating systems emerged for handguns: the revolver, usually holding six cartridges and manipulated by the muscle energy of the hand, and the semiautomatic, harnessing the explosively released energy of the burning powder to cock and reload itself. Since then, design and engineering improvements have been not to lethality but to ease of maintenance and manufacture, or weight reduction. A Glock is “better” than a Luger because you don’t need a PhD to take it apart, nor a fleet of machinists to produce the myriad pins, levers, springs and chunks of steel that make it go bang. Moreover, you can lose a Glock in a flood and find it six months later in the mud, and it still will shoot perfectly, while the Luger would have become a nice paperweight.

In fact, the extended magazine actually vitiates the pistol’s usefulness as a weapon for most needs, legitimate or illegitimate. The magazine destroys the pistol’s essence; it is no longer concealable.

Stephen Hunter is author of the Bob Lee Swagger series of novels. I’ve read two of them, and they’re as good as anything Tom Clancy ever wrote. Highly recommended.

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An excellent idea. Put him in the next cell.

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of President Ronald Reagan.

I had the pleasure of meeting Governor Reagan in 1975 when he came to speak at the Yale Political Union, and then the honor of working on his campaign during spring break the following March. Those were good times.

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I am not making this up.

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Original Greek statues were brightly painted, but after thousands of years, those paints have worn away. Find out how shining a light on the statues can be all that’s required to see them as they were thousands of years ago.

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Wearing jeans and leaving her auburn hair uncovered never created problems for Rayana Khasi, a 22-year-old Muslim engineering student in the coastal state of Kerala.

But then came the threats. About two months ago, members of the Popular Front of India, a fast-growing Muslim political and social organization in Kerala, allegedly started sending text messages to her saying, “You’re committing blasphemy.”

Oh, say it ain’t so.

Whenever we think we’ve got it bad, bear in mind that India’s got it worse. They have more Muslims, and a longer history of being oppressed by Muslims, than any place outside of the sandbox itself.

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In an e-mail obtained by ABC News, a top staffer for the key Senate Appropriations subcommittee called for a meeting of lobbyists and interest groups that would be affected by expected cuts to the Labor and Heath and Human Services budget. The Jan. 24 meeting was attended by approximately 400 people, sources told ABC, and served as a “call to arms” for those determined to fight Republican budget cuts.

And there you have it.

“We obviously have to cut the budget deficit and address the debt problem, but are we going to do that on the backs of the poor, the unemployed, those without child care, et cetera? That’s the kind of thing that could halt the economic recovery in its tracks.”

Well, yeah, that’s the general idea….

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More than four years after its publication, five disgruntled readers have filed a class-action lawsuit against President Jimmy Carter and his publisher, Simon & Schuster, alleging that his 2006 book “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid” contained “numerous false and knowingly misleading statements intended to promote the author’s agenda of anti-Israel propaganda and to deceive the reading public instead of presenting accurate information as advertised.”

Wonder if we could sue the Obamassiah for impersonating an American.

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Didn’t know that there was such a thing as ‘steel crotch Kung Fu’. I guess you learn something new every day.

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Postings on Twitter reflect some well-known regionalisms, such as Southerners’ “y’all,” and Pittsburghers’ “yinz,” and the usual regional divides in references to soda, pop and Coke. But Jacob Eisenstein, a post-doctoral fellow in CMU’s Machine Learning Department, said the automated method he and his colleagues have developed for analyzing Twitter word use shows that regional dialects appear to be evolving within social media.

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

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In some modern forms, the monastic way of life need not even include adherence to a particular faith. One can easily imagine cloistered communities focused on sustainable, ecological practices. Instead of daily prayers, members of the collective might spend a prescribed number of hours reading Thoreau and Wendell Berry; in season, they might cultivate organic heirloom vegetables for their own use and for sale at the local farmer’s market.

And you can play a Cleric in the video game.

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Sometimes natural selection gets a helping hand from humans. A new study tracing the genetic history of a nasty strain of pneumonia-causing bacteria shows that antibiotics and vaccines helped shape the microbe’s evolution.

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According to the Daily Mail Online, an immigration officer who worked for the UK Border Agency managed to get his wife out of his hair for three years by putting her name on the no-fly list while she was visiting the in-laws overseas. Officials confirmed on January 30 that the man had confessed to adding his wife’s name to the list after she left for Pakistan, with the result that she was not allowed to get on a plane to come home. Airline and immigration authorities refused to explain to her why she was not being allowed to travel, although I imagine she put two and two together after her immigration-officer husband stopped answering his phone.

Note that this was not a person ‘of British descent’, as they phrase things these days.

The minor lesson is not to employ foreigners from a different cultural tradition in government.

The major lesson is that people will inevitably abuse power, which is why their power needs to be limited to that which is absolutely necessary.

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I am not making this up.

The Advertising Standards Authority – in these benighted short-attention-span days, perhaps one of the most important guardians of the English language – has described the fields of “Natural Preservatives in toiletries” and “Essential Oils” as being “traditional scientific disciplines” and ruled that people qualified in these areas may fairly be described as “scientists”.

I am tired of hearing about Egypt.

I don’t care what happens in, on, around, or to Egypt.

I DON’T GIVE A SHIT about Egypt.

There. I feel better now.

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Clint Eastwood talks to Jeff Dawson about race, euthanasia, politicians, capital punishment – and how he really feels about the ‘fascist’ role that made him famous.

Eastwood has no time for Lee’s gripes. “He was complaining when I did Bird [the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker]. Why would a white guy be doing that? I was the only guy who made it, that’s why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead he was making something else.” As for Flags of Our Fathers, he says, yes, there was a small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima as a part of a munitions company, “but they didn’t raise the flag. The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn’t do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people’d go, ‘This guy’s lost his mind.’ I mean, it’s not accurate.”

There are actually echoes of Dirty Harry in Changeling, Eastwood says, and he’s not making any concessions to liberals: “I get a kick out of it because the judge convicts the killer to two years in solitary confinement, and then to be hanged. In 1928 they said: ‘You can spend two years thinking about it and then we’re going to kill you.’ Nowadays they’re sitting there worrying about how putting a needle in is a cruel and unusual punishment, the same needle you would have if you had a blood test.”

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After spending hundreds of millions to ensure they owned the party, Lefties and union members have got to be feeling just a little betrayed after the Democratic National Committee’s convention planners chose Charlotte, North Carolina—the least unionized state in the nation—as the site to hold the 2012 convention. While progressive activists’ heads are still spinning, you can bet that, if union bosses in Washington did not agree with the move, and with other “union” cities in the running (including such illustrious hotspots as Cleveland, Minneapolis, and St. Louis), Charlotte would not be having the convention. So, what’s the real reason Charlotte—a city without a single unionized hotel, as well as a union-free convention center—was chosen?

Perhaps it was just a matter of the Crustian nomenklatura not wishing to be inconvenienced by the same minions that it uses to inconvenience their opponents.

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Over the last few years, I’ve been collecting examples of metagames — not the strategy of metagaming, but playable games about videogames. Most of these, like Desert Bus or Quest for the Crown, are one-joke games for a quick laugh. Others, like Cow Clicker and Upgrade Complete, are playable critiques of game mechanics. Some are even (gasp!) fun.

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BANGLADESHI police arrested four people including a Muslim cleric today after a teenage girl, who was accused of having an extra-marital affair with her cousin, was whipped to death.

Fifteen-year-old Hena Begum died in hospital on Monday after a village court in the southern Bangladesh district of Shariatpur sentenced her to 100 lashes, said local police chief A.K.M Shahidur Rahman.

In conservative rural parts of Muslim-majority Bangladesh, rights groups say it is common for women to be publicly whipped for “crimes” such as adultery despite a ban on such religious punishments.

In some documented cases, rape victims have been flogged for being a “participant” in their sexual assault.

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The Rebranding of Indolence as ‘Emerging Adulthood’

There is, for example, Nicole, a young woman Arnett interviews in his book who grew up in a housing project and began working at eight to care for her younger siblings. In a strikingly mature, actually adult way, she managed to hold down a full-time job, take care of her family, and earn a degree. Though this may strike some as a remarkable achievement, this view overlooks how much more fun she could have had if she didn’t have all those pesky responsibilities to weigh her down. “Is it only a grim pessimist like me who sees how many roadblocks there will be on the way to achieving those dreams and who wonders what kind of freewheeling emerging adulthood she is supposed to be having?” Henig laments. Given freedom from economic want, social mores that encourage early marriage, and limits to college access, every poor Vietnamese rice farmer and rural Pakistani bride could be going to yoga classes and selling her handmade textiles on Etsy. Wouldn’t that make the world a better place?

It’s a great time to be a slacker.

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The multinational Task Force 150, to which some 30 navies contribute on a rota basis, has done little to stop the pirates. At any one time there could be a dozen ships on patrol, but this is a vast area, their surveillance is random and even on those few occasions when they could intercept, they do little or nothing.

Our own Royal Navy has shown its muscle only once: in November 2008, a frigate returned fired on pirates who had fired at it, and two of the attackers were killed. But a Ministry of Defence directive since has forbidden RN captains to confront or arrest pirates “for fear of breaching their human rights”.

Perhaps Kenya’s navy has the answer. Its patrol craft covertly operate a shoot-to-kill, take-no-prisoners policy. The Tanzanians almost certainly do the same. The safest ships of all are flying the Russian flag: armed guards aboard them simply blow pirate boats out of the water and leave any survivors to drown. Attacks on Russian vessels have abruptly ceased.

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Arguably, the United States now has a corporate tax code that’s the worst of all worlds. The official rate is higher than in almost any other country, which forces companies to devote enormous time and effort to finding loopholes. Yet the government raises less money in corporate taxes than it once did, because of all the loopholes that have been added in recent decades.

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

Companies that use loopholes to avoid taxes don’t mind the current system, of course, and they have more than a few lobbyists at their disposal.

And, of course, that wouldn’t matter if lobbyists weren’t so effective, i.e. able to funnel campaign contributions to Congressmen, who then repay the favor by sticking little favors in legislation when nobody who cares is looking.

The problem with the current system is that it distorts incentives. Decisions that would otherwise be inefficient for a company — and that are indeed inefficient for the larger economy — can make sense when they bring a big tax break. “Companies should be making investments based on their commercial potential,” as Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University, says, “not for tax reasons.”

No shit. But the problem here is that often legislators are trying to ‘distort incentives’ deliberately, using the tax code for social engineering rather than just a neutral way to raise revenue. Henry Waxman of California, Chuck Schumer of New York, and the late unlamented Ted Kennedy represent poster children for this.

The true paradox of ‘corporate taxes’, of course, which by its nature a writer for the New York Times is not permitted to mention (or even think, I suspect), is that CORPORATIONS DO NOT PAY TAXES, THEIR CUSTOMERS DO. This is obvious to anybody who has an elementary grasp of business, which unfortunately nobody receiving a government (or media) paycheck has.

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Considering becoming a stalker or rapist? There’s an app for that.

Mike Masnik takes a look at the implications of disintermediation.

In fact, that’s part of the reason why middlemen exist in so many areas. Asking for money is difficult, and asking for and handling the money is a function that many people just feel more comfortable handing off to a third party. Yet, after all of this, when the deal does go through, and you realize that it’s a direct connection between two people who are happy about how each came out of the transaction, people begin to realize it shouldn’t be awkward at all.

Of course, this is the crux of what a market economy is supposed to actually be about: transactions where all parties are better off post transaction, and happier for it. That may sound crass and businesslike, but if everyone’s better off, isn’t that a good thing?