Read it.

I’m thinking, recycle it into toilet paper sounds about right.

Read it.

Freeberg ponders the quality that dare not speak its name.

I’m talking about this so-called “research” people do, in which they find there is some significant difference between life in the U.S. and life abroad…they flesh it out, to such an extent that you’re pressed to come to a conclusion that there must be something different about the people who live here.

And then — they stop. They don’t define the difference. They don’t even offer a possibility. They just sort of drop it out there, like a stink bomb.

Read it.

When the Cambridge graduate discovered the compromising pictures had been discovered and circulated throughout the £29,670-a-year school she was reportedly escorted home in tears.

The pictures were taken by Fiona Corthine, a fellow teacher who is head of photography.

Tyler Cowen has some interesting thoughts.

I confess that a lot of my positions are chosen because they are most compatible with my mood of ‘grumpiness’. It certainly works for me.

Read it.

Due to the sheer number of jobs that directly or indirectly benefit from Koch Industries, the Left’s undertaking to topple the Koch brothers and their companies may have the negative consequence of actually hurting those the Left purports to want to help—namely union workers. This has a top official with the United Steelworkers concerned.

One of the most glaring holes in the distributionist agenda is their perennial refusal to cope intellectually with production — their fight is about how to divide up a pie that apparently just drops from heaven — and so they keep shooting themselves in most of their lower body when they start agitating for ‘social justice’.

Notice that the union defense of the Koch brothers isn’t based on what’s fair or what’s best for America; it’s totally based on what’s best for union members. The essential message is ‘don’t cut off our nose to spite your face’. So principle is all well and good when only the other side is getting hurt, but another thing entirely when it comes out of the wallets of the kind of people the Left is supposedly defending.

So the problem for the advocates of a boycott against Koch is that it can only marginally hurt Koch, and the workers who are the epitome of what advanced manufacturing jobs in the United States ought to look like, would be the first casualties of a boycott. Of course, this will eventually drive a wedge between groups that are otherwise in political alignment.

In other words, don’t go pissing in the soup.

As in most such cases, ‘follow the money’ is a good rule of thumb.

Read it.

Asians, who faced openly racist exclusion laws for nearly 80 years, huddled in Chinatowns, most of them on the West Coast. One was in Washington State, where the grandson of a house-servant would be named the first Chinese-American ambassador to China — Gary Locke. But his story is already one for the textbooks, the old route to the Asian-American Dream.

The new narrative comes from the ethnoburbs, a term coined in a 2009 book by Arizona State University professor Wei Li to describe entire cities dominated by a nonwhite ethnic group. They are suburban in look, but urban in political, culinary and educational values, attracting immigrants with advanced degrees and ready business skills.

As one would expect for somebody writing in the New York Times, Egan looks at the western U.S. from the viewpoint of a Peace Corps volunteer in the Andes, but even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.

Read it.

Read it.

Well, duh. That’s called ‘sedition’, and Muslims don’t put up with that shit the way liberals do.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

A newspaper claimed the unnamed 34-year-old sportsman had launched a murderous rampage in revenge after his daughter was gang-raped and infected with HIV.

Only a Voice of the Crust could call that ‘murder’.

Meanwhile some fear the tragedy could create fresh fissures in South Africa’s fragile race relations.

The vast majority of South African rugby stars are white and it is possible the suspect could be accused of deliberately targeting black victims.

Perhaps he objected to a gang of black thugs raping and infecting his daughter. Does that come as such a surprise? It’s not as if the South African police are all that efficient at preventing — or solving — violent crimes.

Read it.

And past time.

To know why Islam is a mortal danger one must not only consider the Koran but also the character of Muhammad, who conceived the Koran and the entirety of Islam.

The Koran is not just a book. Muslims believe that Allah himself wrote it and that it was dictated to Muhammad in the original version, the Umm al-Kitab, which is kept on a table in heaven. Consequently one cannot argue with the contents. Who would dare to disagree with what Allah himself has written? This explains much of Muhammadan behaviour, from the violence of jihad to the hatred and persecution of Jews, Christians and other non-Muslims and apostates. What we in the West regard as abnormal, is perfectly normal for Islam.

A second insuperable problem with Islam is the figure of Muhammad. He is not just anyone. He is al-insan al-kamil, the perfect man. To become a Muslim one must pronounce the Shahada (the Muslim creed). By pronouncing the Shahada one testifies that there is no god that can be worshipped except Allah, and one testifies that Muhammad is his servant and messenger.

The Koran, and hence Allah, lays down that Muhammad’s life must be imitated. The consequences of this are horrendous and can be witnessed on a daily basis.

Those who don’t believe in the existence of Satan, or his influence in the world, need to consider carefully how to explain away Islam.

Probably not.

So much for the hope that Iraq and Afghanistan might actually have taught the West anything lasting about trying to impose democracy at the point of a gun. Instead, it is as if Iraq, which, in the United States, was initially welcomed by most liberal internationalists and neoconservatives alike as a war of liberation, had never happened, and, instead, we have traveled backward in time. Remember those halcyon days of the late 1990s when Tony Blair was promising the world that in the future the West would fight wars in the name of its values, not just of its interests, in effect promising that the wars of the twenty-first century would be noble wars of altruism? If you don’t, well, don’t worry: If the war in Libya is any indication, you’ll have the chance to live them all over again. Of course, the catastrophe in Iraq was supposed to have sobered us, and made even the most ardent liberal interventionists realize that Pascal’s great phrase, “He who would act the angel, acts the beast,” expresses the stark truth about what we self-flatteringly call humanitarian interventions. But instead, here we go again.

Read it.

To become an exorcist you must be a Roman Catholic priest and have permission from your bishop to join the International Association of Exorcists.

No doubt Federal tuition assistance programs and the usual ‘diversity’ affirmative action regulations apply, so don’t get discouraged if you aren’t a priest or a Roman Catholic.

(‘International Association of Exorcists’ looks funny without ‘AFL-CIO’ after it, somehow.)

Read it.

Straight from the horse’s ass’s mouth, so to speak.

Read it.

We haven’t mocked a Kennedy in a while, so I guess it’s time.

Until I read Howie Carr’s Boston Herald column this morning, I had missed the big news from Brown University. Former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy has graciously accepted a two-year appointment as a visiting fellow at the Brown Institute for Brain Science, through the 2012-13 academic year.

Carr cruelly comments: “I guess the rocket-science school was full up. He is quite the scholar, of course.” Carr quotes Kennedy speaking on the floor of the House: ‘I myself have educated myself.'”

I haven’t mocked Brown (the Safety School of the Ivy League) in a while, either, so I guess it’s time for that, too.

According to Bloomberg Businessweek.

And we all know what experts they are in cars (and ugly).

I’m not sure I agree that the Volkswagen Thing is ugly’ They were targeting a particular demographic (WWII German Staff Car Nostalgia) and I suspect they succeeded – I had a classmate in law school who was a reservist in the 101st, and he loved his.

Have to agree on the Gremlin and the Pacer, though.

But anybody who would call the DeLorean ‘ugly’ is certainly a Communist.

Check it out.

So all you ‘activists’ can STFU. (Yeah, I’m lookin’ at *you*, Michelle.)

Read it.

A genomic survey of the microbial life in an Antarctic lake has revealed a new virophage — a virus that attacks viruses. The discovery suggests that these life forms are more common, and have a larger role in the environment, than was once thought.

Let’s watch the race to patent it.

The Economist is always worth reading.

Singapore. That’s all you need to know.

WHEN people talk about Singapore’s education miracle, they normally think of rows of clever young mathematicians. The hair-design and beauty-therapy training centres at the Institute of Technical Education (ITE) are rather different.

Singapore is important to any study of government just now, both in the West and in Asia. That is partly because it does some things very well, in much the same way that some Scandinavian countries excel in certain fields. But it is also because there is an emerging theory about a superior Asian model of government, put forward by both despairing Western businesspeople and hubristic Asian chroniclers.

Read it.

These bills have grown less popular as people became aware of them, and started to ask basic questions, like: “why should a huge corporation dictate what my town or city does with its own infrastructure?” Or: “Why should a random partisan bloviator 2,000 miles away dictate what my town or city does with its own infrastructure?” The fact is that these communities wouldn’t be putting this time and effort into infrastructure improvements if local monopolies and duopolies were meeting their needs.

Good question.

Time Warner Cable, who in most markets has the luxury of lagging on network upgrades due to limited competition, isn’t sure what to do with this “problem.” Like most large corporations unused to competition, they’ve gone the protectionist route and have spent millions lobbying North Carolina lawmakers like Rep. Marilyn Avila. As a result, well-lobbied North Carolina politicians do what well-lobbied politicians always do, and last night passed Time Warner Cable’s anti-community fiber bill with a vote of 81-37.

Your tax dollars at work … for Time-Warner.

Read it.

We’ve posted in the past about the spurious claims by CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood front groups that “hate crimes” against Muslims are increasing in the United States. When official law enforcement statistics are examined — rather than mere statements by Muslim apologists and their leftist friends — the actual incidence of such crimes is seen to be very low, and getting lower.

The sad truth is that Muslims are safer in the United States than they are in most Muslim countries.

Read it.

Moments before a conference call with reporters was scheduled to get underway on Tuesday morning, Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate, apparently unaware that many of the reporters were already on the line, began to instruct his fellow senators on how to talk to reporters about the contentious budget process.

After thanking his colleagues — Barbara Boxer of California, Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, Thomas R. Carper of Delaware and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut — for doing the budget bidding for the Senate Democrats, who are facing off against the House Republicans over how to cut spending for the rest of the fiscal year, Mr. Schumer told them to portray John A. Boehner of Ohio, the speaker of the House, as painted into a box by the Tea Party, and to decry the spending cuts that he wants as extreme. “I always use the word extreme,” Mr. Schumer said. “That is what the caucus instructed me to use this week.”

A minute or two into the talking-points tutorial, though, someone apparently figured out that reporters were listening, and silence fell.

A rare glimpse of the sausage being made.

Read it.

The United States Navy has been working on next-gen weaponry ever since the last-gen was present-gen, and if the next next-gen ever actually arrives, well… we don’t stand a chance at lasting very long. According to Wired, the Navy’s Office of Naval Research is expecting laser technology (as it relates to weaponry) to mature in the next score, and if all goes well, a free-electron laser could be mounted on a ship during the 2020s. As of now, FELs produce a 14-kilowatt beam, but that figure needs to hit 100+ in order to seriously defend a ship; unfortunately for those who adore peace, it seems we’re well on our way to having just that.

Yeah, baby.

Read it.

Three years after the stock market cratered in 1929, American schools suffered their own crash. School districts had managed to ride out the early years of the Great Depression; in fact, because many districts depended on property taxes, which didn’t crash as fast as income taxes, more than a few managed to increase spending.

But in the 1932–33 school year, many districts ran out of funds. With more than one in five workers unemployed, many households didn’t have the money to pay property taxes, so all of a sudden, the school boards didn’t have enough money to pay their bills. Some 2,200 schools in 11 states closed entirely—in Alabama, schools in 50 out of 67 counties shut down. Many more districts cut services or sharply reduced their hours; thousands of districts in the Midwest and South shrank the school year to fewer than 120 days.

Government activity is essentially parasitical, and you can’t get blood from a corpse. This is why it behooves you to laugh whenever a politician calls for an ‘investment’; it’s not an investment, because investments produce income; it’s just plain spending that s/he is too shy to call spending.

Politicians love to bestow goodies on their constituents, especially retirement benefits for public-sector workers—largesse that some future sucker ultimately has to pay for. Decades of this kind of behavior have left a lot of states with growing structural deficits.

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

Cuomo himself has described the process thusly: “The governor announces the budget; unions come together, put $10 million in a bank account, run television ads against the governor. The governor’s popularity drops; the governor’s knees weaken; the governor falls to one knee, collapses, makes a deal.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, over the past decade, New York’s spending has grown almost twice as fast as personal income.

Our American political system at its … finest?

Barro thinks the state may have finally hit its fiscal capacity, with businesses fleeing and the beginnings of a tax revolt in the New York City suburbs over property taxes and school costs. This has happened before—top personal-income-tax rates went up to 15 percent in the 1970s, and the result was an exodus of businesses, driven as much by middle managers outraged at their tax burdens, as by top executives incensed at the business taxes. But the governors and legislators who brought spending under control the last time around didn’t have the magnitude of pension and health-care burdens now facing the state.

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. The problem with soaking the rich is that they can stay dry someplace else much more easily than most.

Read it.

Kirkland & Ellis LLP is pleased to announce a significant expansion of its already strong antitrust practice with the addition of former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Tim Muris and his FTC Chief of Staff Christine Wilson to the Firm’s Washington, D.C., office. Muris is the only former FTC chairman with an active private practice.

No doubt.

“The enforcement experience of this group promises to provide our clients with unsurpassed insights about the regulatory environment in which they operate,” said Gene Assaf, a partner in the Washington, D.C., office who serves on Kirkland’s Global Management Executive Committee….

Translation: How to game the system.

Muris served as the chairman of the FTC from 2001 to 2004.

Another fine legacy from the younger Bush, the Nixon of a new generation.

Read it.

Australia’s Federal and State police forces have deployed resources to investigate virtual worlds to combat money laundering by cybercriminals.

NSW Detective Superintendent Commander Colin Dyson told iTnews at the Cards and Payments Australasia conference in Sydney today that cybercriminals were using virtual, gaming platforms to communicate and transfer funds around the globe.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Electrons do….

Read it.

A Swedish boy has been mauled by a bear after he disturbed the hibernating animal by skiing over its lair.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Read it.

Cademartiri and his fellow boffins at Harvard uni have tested their flame-zapping gizmo in the lab, using a 600-watt amplifier hooked up to a “wand-like probe”. This setup was apparently able to snuff out test flames “more than a foot high”. The team think that it should be possible to get similar effects with a less power-hungry system using 60W or less, raising the possibility of portable equipment.

Read it.

Scientists have found the strongest evidence yet that a puzzling gap in the electronic structures of some high-temperature superconductors could indicate a new phase of matter. Understanding this “pseudogap” has been a 20-year quest for researchers who are trying to control and improve these breakthrough materials, with the ultimate goal of finding superconductors that operate at room temperature.

“Our findings point to management and control of this other phase as the correct path toward optimizing these novel superconductors for energy applications, as well as searching for new superconductors,” said Zhi-Xun Shen of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science (SIMES), a joint institute of the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University.

Read it.

It’s basically a version of graphene constructed out of silicon, which doesn’t naturally align itself into the same eminently useful honeycomb shape — but, given a little prod here and a layer of silver or ceramic compound there, can do much the same thing, and with better computing compatibility.

Read it.

Better living through chemistry. Such people make our lives better but don’t get the attention that accrues to those who make our lives worse.

May his memory be eternal.

Read it.

American corporations moving business overseas to avoid America’s high corporate tax rates was the topic of a thirteen-and-a-half minute story by Leslie Stahl on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” show Sunday.

On a certain level, it was an illuminating story, because it showed how America’s high corporate tax rate essentially pushes economic activity to lower-tax jurisdictions overseas. But it was also a frustrating story to watch, because, like the Times, “60 Minutes” seems to be coming at it from the perspective of wanting to dream up some way to force the companies to pay higher taxes.

Indeed, for a sane person to watch a Voice of the Crust in action is highly frustrating. But one must remember that there is an Agenda here, and that Agenda has little to do with what we used to call Common Sense.

Everything for the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State. — Benito Mussolini

By attempting to avoid taxes, corporations violate Fascist Principle #1; by doing so by escaping overseas, they violate Fascist Principle #2. Neither can be tolerated.

One of my key tests for a country has always been whether people are lined up trying to sneak in or lined up trying to sneak out. East Berlin, North Korea, and the Soviet Union are bad by that test; America is good, because immigrants want to come here. You could apply a similar test to countries for whether companies want to be based there. America shouldn’t have to pass some kind of law preventing companies from moving their operations to Zug or Ireland, as Mr. Doggett seems to suggest. We should have laws that create such an attractive business environment that the companies in Zug and in Ireland are falling over themselves trying to figure out a way to move here.

A good rule of thumb.

Read it.

Many blogs and major articles, including posts on YouTern, have pointed out that a college degree no longer equates to a job offer. As the economy settles into new realities, employers are expecting more of candidates with a fresh education and little experience.

College students are already responding by adding internships as a compulsory component of their college experience. According to NACE, over the past decade or two the college students that have completed an internship have increased from 10% to over 70%. Taking this trend a step further, many students have increased the number of internships they complete, believing that to be competitive the norm has become at least three career-relevant internships during their college career.

I, for one, would like it better if they were called ‘apprentices’ rather than ‘interns’.

Freeberg takes a look at modern advertising.

First question I have is: How do I blog this without picking on the girls? Clearly, men don’t give a flying fig about creamy, and any fool can plainly see a man is not made more receptive to the prospect of buying something by the idea that his wife or girlfriend is going to humiliate him in public yet another time. The tutor who burns up all this time on one thing and on absolutely nothing else is obviously cobbled together to churn up some female appeal. Rare is the man who will stoop to being shown how to do something; and, I daresay, the one who is excited about such a thing has yet to be born. The 4g network does have some appeal for us, we pine for lost youth just like our female counterparts, albeit not in the same way perhaps. Just as many men are snobbish about the environment and want to be “green” so they can say they’re better than the next guy, more worthy of continuing to live here.

My fiance offered up the situation with pickup truck commercials. I had to give her that one. This truck is tough! Grrrr! But then again…after we checked out and mingled with the traffic, there were a lot of Big! Tough! Grrrr! trucks out there, not being used to pull tree stumps or transport cords of wood, just tootling down the road. Sitting way up high. Being safe. Feeling invulnerable…and driving in such a manner as to reflect that, should a collision occur, Number One would come out of it just fine. The other driver would be screwed. But the pilot of the larger vessel would likely not even know anything happened. Like a nine hundred foot long cruise ship running over an otter or something.

My wife is perennially afraid of being on the losing end of such a transaction, which is why she’s a white-knuckle driver.

There is a skill we are talking about here, that is important but doesn’t get a lot of attention because it doesn’t have a name. It is roughly analogous to the skill involved in climbing on to a merry-go-round without anyone stopping it for you. Let the world function in whatever way it will; learn all you can about it anyway.

Certain people can perceive flow and cope with it, and certain people cannot. I suspect that bad dancers are probably bad drivers, and vice versa. People who expect the world to adapt to them, rather than the other way around, and go through life pissed off when it doesn’t happen.

Read it.

Pretty sad, when the Russians are smarter than we are.

Read it.

Good thing Communists don’t do Social Security, or they’d be in trouble.

Steve Sailer, as you might expect, has a bit of fun with this one.

Next stop: Portland, whitest blue-state city in the country.

Read it. (The Bible, as well as the article.) (In Greek, if you can handle it. King James would be cool with it.)

All translations are ‘false’ in the sense that it is ordinarily impossible to communicate in language B the exact same meaning and connotation of a particular phrase in language A. This is especially true when going from Greek to English; both are very flexible and astonishingly subtle languages, but they categorize the phenomena of the world in different ways. Greek, for example, has three terms that are translated into English as ‘love’, and only one term for what we divide into ‘art’ and ‘science’.

Read it.

Food finickiness, in other words, is a luxury, not a mandate. Most people couldn’t indulge it even if they wanted to. Our friend keeps this in perspective. In recent years, however, the locavore, foodie lifestyle has transmogrified from what it obviously is—a luxury—into a quasi-spiritual ideology resembling late-stage environmentalism.

The truth is, if we abandoned industrialized farming and everyone adopted the locavore lifestyle, the human race would be much poorer, and several billion people wouldn’t have food.

Read it.

It can carry two people up to 250 miles at speeds of up to 20mph on a single charge of the battery underneath the driver’s seat.

In case you should want to do that.

Read it.

Our understanding is that the Tapestry features 45 to 48 threads per inch which gives us a resolution approximating 47dpi with a colour depth of 8, ignoring later repairs. Thus, in information terms, the tapestry contains 2.429MB of information, assuming 1-bit per colour, 47dpi, and a 51,678.72 square inch surface area.

Joel Kotkin is always worth reading.

The ongoing Census reveals the continuing evolution of America’s cities from small urban cores to dispersed, multi-polar regions that includes the city’s surrounding areas and suburbs. This is not exactly what most urban pundits, and journalists covering cities, would like to see, but the reality is there for anyone who reads the numbers.

This is why mass transit, especially commuter rail and HOV lanes, doesn’t work, and will never work; the functional equivalent of setting up hitching posts along the sidewalk to encourage folks to switch from automobiles to horses.

Read it.

There are more than 150 former normal schools like Winona, educating hundreds of thousands of students nationwide. Nearly all followed an identical progression: They became teachers colleges, then dropped the “teachers,” then dropped the “college.” Usually, they are medium-size, relatively obscure, and located away from central metropolitan areas. That’s why directions on how to get there are often embedded in their name—Northern Iowa, Eastern Michigan, University of Maine at Presque Isle, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. Most of the rest, like Winona, are stamped with the reassuring label of “State.”

Why did almost every institution do exactly the same thing in exactly the same way? Because we have only one way of thinking about higher-education excellence in this country. We are all entranced by visions of the academic city-state, the palace of learning on the hill. That’s where the administrators and faculty who populated the former normal schools came from, and where they wanted to return. If their alma mater wouldn’t have them, a copy would do.

That pattern, documented by Christensen in scores of other industries, begins with new organizations’ using new technology to create low-cost alternatives to traditional products and services. Crucially, the new products tend not to be very good at first. So established firms ignore them, preferring to continue selling better, more-expensive services to well-off customers in the traditional way. The crisis comes years later, after upstart firms have used steadily improving business practices and technology to move up the industry food chain, and older businesses remain shackled by outdated organizational models and cultures. By the time the upstarts have caught up and become competitive, the old firms simply can’t change quickly enough to avoid oblivion. Once you’ve spent $20-million on a campus gym, you can’t just sell it for cash or stop paying people to work there. Once you’ve established 18 academic departments in the college of liberal arts, it’s hard to shut any of them down.

Read it.

In order to distinguish their synthetic DNA from that naturally present in the bacterium, Venter’s team coded several famous quotes into their DNA, including one from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”

After announcing their work, Venter explained, his team received a cease and desist letter from Joyce’s estate, saying that he’d used the Irish writer’s work without permission. ”We thought it fell under fair use,” said Venter.

There are circumstances under which the phrase ‘utterly absurd’ is totally inadequate. This is one of them. Our current system of ‘intellectual property’ laws is another.

The synthetic DNA also included a quote from physicist Richard Feynman, “What I cannot build, I cannot understand.”

That prompted a note from Caltech, the school where Feyman taught for decades. They sent Venter a photo of the blackboard on which Feynman composed the quote –and it showed that he actually wrote, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

“We agreed what was on the Internet was wrong,” said Venter. “So we’re going back to change the genetic code to correct it.”

Would that other areas of life were so amenable to improvement.

Steve Sailer indulges in some irony.

From the outside, they looked like other recently built San Gabriel townhouses — two stories, Spanish style, with roofs of red tile. Inside they were maternity centers for Chinese women willing to pay handsomely to travel here to give birth to American citizens.

All that stuff is just plain illegal. No way no how can you move walls around without proper permits.

On the other hand, random foreigners grabbing lifelong U.S. citizenship for their children — including such perks as 13 years of free public education in an upscale San Gabriel Valley school district, cheap tuition at UC Berkeley, low interest SBA loans, government contracting minority preferences, the right to import their parents and put them on Medicare and in public old folks homes, and other goodies — through these scams is, legally speaking, A-OK, 100% on the up and up….

Read it.

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

Read it.

Can Klingon be far behind?

In fact, I’m surprised that they didn’t do Klingon first.

Read it.

Remind me why we still have troops in Germany. Last I heard, the Russians are no longer a threat.

Bryan Caplan has a nice little puzzler for you.