Read it. And watch the video.

Examples include cameras that block saving images as RAW files, phones that are designed to identify and drain third-party batteries, and, of course, printers that are designed to reject third-party ink.

Read it.

A Republican candidate for Congress in Oregon against Democrat Peter DeFazio, Art Robinson, claims that his three children are being expelled from the nuclear engineering graduate program at Oregon State University in retaliation for his political activity.

ThoughtCrime is punished wherever it goes.

Read it.

A United Nations-sponsored youth center near Ramallah has announced plans to name a youth football tournament after Wafa Idris, the first Palestinian female suicide bomber, Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reports.

Not really a surprise, but a useful reminder.

That’s some Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Raymond Ibrahim isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions.

“You can sit here and talk about jihad from here to doomsday, what will it do? Suppose you prove beyond any shadow of doubt that Islam is constitutionally violent, where do you go from there?”

Such was Columbia professor Hamid Dabashi’s response to my assertion that Islamists seek to resurrect the caliphate and wage offensive jihad to bring the world under Islamic rule (during a 2008 debate titled “Clash of Civilizations”).

Consider the caliphate: its very existence would usher in a state of constant hostility. Both historically and doctrinally, the caliphate’s function is to wage jihad, whenever and wherever possible, to bring the infidel world under Islamic dominion and enforce sharia. In fact, most of what is today called the “Muslim world”—from Morocco to Pakistan—was conquered, bit by bit, by a caliphate that began in Arabia in 632.

A jihad-waging, sharia-enforcing caliphate represents a permanent, existentialist enemy—not a temporal foe that can be bought or pacified through diplomacy or concessions. Such a caliphate is precisely what Islamists around the world are feverishly seeking to establish. Without active, preemptive measures, it is only a matter of time before they succeed.

In this context, what, exactly, is the Western world prepared to do about it—now, before the caliphate becomes a reality? Would it be willing to launch a preemptive offensive—politically, legally, educationally, and, if necessary, militarily—to prevent its resurrection? Could the West ever go on the offensive, openly and confidently—now, when it has the upper-hand—to incapacitate its enemies?

Islam is more of a clear and present danger to our culture and way of life than Communism ever was. Communism eventually dissolved because it couldn’t keep up with modern civilization; Islam has demonstrated that modern civilization is not one of its priorities, and indeed may be one of its enemies.

Read it.

A Muslim extremist who burned replica poppies on Armistice Day said he will wear his £50 fine as a “badge of honour” as campaigners condemned his lenient sentence.

The MAC group started shouting microphone-led chants including “Burn, burn British soldiers”, “British soldiers murderers” and “British soldiers terrorists” during the two-minute silence at 11am.

Welcome to Londonistan.

The married father-of-two earns £480 a month working part time but also gets £792 a month in state benefits, made up of £240 working tax credit; £432 child tax credit and £120 child benefit. In addition to the fine he was ordered to pay a £15 victim surcharge.

I believe they call that ‘feeding the hand that bites you’.

Read it.

“There’s many people that are beginning to believe this is a delay tactic by the Democrats in the Senate so that these recall elections can be organized by the Obama team out of Chicago, which they are, as we start to do the research on the people that have filed the petition,” Fitzgerald told Newsradio 620 WTMJ’s “Wisconsin’s Morning News.”

No surprises here, but a useful reminder.

The Other McCain is on the case.

The U.S. military is too white and too male at the top and needs to change recruiting and promotion policies and lift its ban on women in combat, an independent report for Congress said Monday.

Under the provisions of The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2009, Section 596, Public Law 110-417, Congress established the Department of Defense (DoD) Military Leadership Diversity Commission (MLDC).

Imagining our enemies laughing their butts off.

The problem is, that when more women and minorities wind up in uniform, ‘progressives’ go ballistic about the American military machine taking advantage of these poor exploited classes.

Read it.

Chinese blogger and activist Michael Anti wants to know why he is less worthy of a Facebook account than company founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dog.

A very good question.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Pakistani authorities have released details of a letter threatening Christians and others who support repeal of Pakistan’s blasphemy law.

The note was found along side the body of Shabaz Bhatti, the Christian minister of minorities following his assassination this week.

The Pilcrow.

This is a pilcrow: ¶. They crop up surprisingly frequently, bookending paragraphs on websites with a typographic bent, for instance, and teaming up with the section symbol in legal documents to form picturesque reference marks such as §3, ¶7. The pilcrow even appears in Microsoft Word, where it adorns a button which reveals hidden characters such as spaces and carriage returns. (Click on that button, in fact, and a multitude of pilcrows will appear, one at the end of each line of text.)

Even now, many marks of punctuation still function wholly or largely as vocal stage direction: parentheses are the typographical signposts of a spoken aside, the exclamation mark implies a surprised, rising tone of voice, and the question mark is as much about inflection as it is about interrogation.

Read it.

Turns out that both male and female readers both preferred male protagonists.  They were more likely to agree with the sentences, “I feel I can understand and appreciate the main character and situation in the story” and “I would like to continue reading to find out what happens next in the story” when the main character was male.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

The Economist, as usual, makes perfect sense.

Without public-sector unions, government workers would lobby their way to padded paychecks, unobtanium-plated pensions, and hermetic job security anyway. Which is just to say, government workers don’t really need unions at all.

The thing is, public-sector unions don’t work like this. They aren’t bargaining against capitalists for a fair cut of the cooperative surplus. They’re bargaining against everybody who pays taxes and/or benefits from government spending. The question of distribution in democratic politics isn’t about splitting up jointly-produced profits. It’s about interest groups fighting to grab a bigger share of government revenue while sticking competing groups with the tax bill. Because of the sheer size and relatively uniform interests of the group, public employees constitute a politically powerful bloc with or without unions. As the percentage of the labour force employed by the government rises, the heft of this group only increases. Public-employee unions simply consolidate an already impressive concentration of political bargaining power. Moreover, as the Democratic Party comes increasingly to rely on patronage from the public-sector unions, the determination of Democratic politicians to bargain against the unions on behalf of taxpayers and the beneficiaries of competing government programmes necessarily weakens. For Democratic office-seekers, generous union contracts are “willingly given”, as the Times put it, in roughly the same sense that unaffiliated private-sector workers “willingly” accept low wages and poor working conditions.

Read it.

In a comments thread, shorelines linked to a fascinating Scientific American article about adolescence by psychologist Robert Epstein. In it, he points to the invention of the very idea of adolescence and its non-universality. In a sample of 186 pre-industrial societies, for example, only 60% had words for the life stage and most had little or no problems with anti-social teen behavior. This data, however, contrasts strongly with new research suggesting that adolescent brains are quite different from adult brains.

Read it.

These days saying “organic” isn’t good enough: being an eco-foodie has become a high art. If you want scallops, you don’t just buy scallops. They need to be labelled “hand-dived”: a dirty big trawler didn’t drag them and their delicate eco-system from the ocean floor; instead, a wholesome, Buddha-worshipping man donned a diving suit and soft gloves before he swam to the bottom of the sea, asked the scallop’s permission to remove him from his rock, and then lulled him to sleep with soft music playing from an iPod.

Read it.

Is monarchy anachronistic? You bet.

Nonsense. It represents a basic human impulse. No ‘list of remaining monarchies’ would be complete without including autocratic states from Chavez to Qadaffi to Kim Jong Il, which would expand the nominal total by a factor of two, at least.

“It’s easy just to say, ‘tear it all down,’ isn’t it? But what are you going to replace it with?” asks Mary Thomas, a newspaper vendor who sells royal souvenirs near Green Park in London. “I think most people would say that they trust the queen a lot more than [they do] the politicians who run this country.”

That’s a no-brainer.

Spain’s popular king is the official head of state, but never intervenes publicly in politics. (Although at a 2007 Ibero-American summit he famously responded to leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who was interrupting a Spanish official’s speech, by asking “Why don’t you shut up?”)

Would that an American President would have the balls to do the same.

Read it.

I’m just guessing, here, but I don’t think that our paleolithic ancestors had this problem.

A Useful List.

10) When women see Dads out with kids they assume we’re sensitive people who like to chit chat. We’re guys. We don’t chit or chat. When we see people we know we say “hey” but we don’t stop moving. We never stop moving. We’re like sharks in that way.

Read it.

This is both funny and scary at the same time.

What’s really scary is, that people make pots of money doing this sort of thing.

Many of them are PhD economists….

Read it.

The way things are going, we may actually need it.

Read it.

No, because governments have a vested interest in making sure that their boundaries are all-inclusive, and they have the guns to make it stick. This sort of “let’s move away from the government we don’t like” was outdated two hundred years ago, as the Mormons found out in Utah and the Boers found out in South Africa.

But it’s still an interesting read.

Read it.

Much of the modern world is today the product of Protestant cultures – or cultures in which the view of the Bible has been largely shaped by the Protestant project.

The most critical part of that intellectual project was the decoupling of Scripture and Church. For Martin Luther or the early Reformers (particularly the successors of Luther, Calvin and Swingli), the Bible became the only authority (sola Scriptura) and it was through the Bible that the Church was to be judged, corrected and reformed. Thus the Scriptures took on a new form – one in which they became an independent book with authority over everything else. Problems of interpretation were often met with theories of “soul competency” in which it was postulated that each individual soul was competent to interpret the Scriptures for themselves. Of course, these were all novel doctrines, unknown to the Fathers of the Church.

One of the results was to create something of a Christian parallel to the Koran. Christianity, at the hands of well-intentioned reformers became a “people of the book.” A single Christian, with a copy of the Scriptures, somehow became a sufficient example of Christianity. Of course this phenomenon was itself a contradiction of the Scriptures. Today we see the embodiment of this sea-change. Crowds of young and old, carrying Bibles under their arms, dutifully make their way into buildings, euphemistically called “Churches,” although in America they are increasingly called something more attractive than “Church.”

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Read it. And watch the video.

I’m just going to come out and say it: the Khan Academy is the best thing that has happened to education since Socrates. The brainchild of Salman Khan, the Khan Academy became famous by teaching simple math lessons for free through over 2000 YouTube videos. Now, after millions in donations and an expansion of the company, the academy is so much more. The website for the Khan Academy already had exercises you could use to test your understanding of the videos you just watched, but in the past few weeks the website has exploded with wonderful new features. You can create a profile for the site simply by logging in through Google or Facebook. You can track your progress with some wonderful metrics. Teachers (or ‘coaches’) can monitor student progress in groups. Students can earn badges to keep them interested. The list goes on and on and it’s all free. Free, I tell you! In true Khan Academy fashion, Sal explains these new features in the video below. As they continue to expand beyond math, and increase the sophistication of their platform, I am left with little doubt that the Khan Academy represents the future of education. And it’s already here.

Read it.

Currently, many eyes are riveted on the battles taking place in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states where public sector unions are desperately fighting to hold on to their privileges. I don’t blame them for that–privileged classes generally find it easy to believe that their privileges are well-deserved–but, while the results of these battles are in doubt, I wonder whether the war is not, in essence, over. The reality is that we, the taxpayers, can’t afford public sector unions. And the unions and their members have nowhere else to go–no one else to sell themselves to, except us. So I think they are doomed.

Read it.

Ever since Jay Gould, Leland Stanford, and Cornelius Vanderbilt acquired their first legislatures, railroads have been best understood as political networks, rather than as transportation lines. The Obama administration is hyping high-speed rail (HSR) with a $53 billion proposal not because the president is a trainspotter or because he collects back copies of the Official Guide of the Railways (like I do). Rather, it’s because politicians understand that the states blew their money on generous pension plans, pretentious sports stadiums, and bridges to nowhere, and now need billions to plug their budget deficits. It’s easier to funnel money into tapped–out state capitals under the smoke and mirrors of a feel-good rail project than it is to announce that the federal government stands behind states’ subprime debts. The Government Accounting Office estimates unfunded state liabilities at $405 billion, which is probably what HSR would, in the end, cost. Think of it as the Stimulus Express.

Actually, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, I don’t suspect the TSA of being under orders to make the process of flying so unpleasant that people will prefer — and vote to fund — High Speed Rail. That would show an unprecedented degree of foresight on the part of government employees, who have never in the past demonstrated even plain common sense, much less showed any inclination than to look more than about 15 minutes into the future.

Read it.

Domestic cats roll. Oh, they roll and roll and roll – not constantly, but often enough that the behaviour eventually caught the attention of scientists. In 1994, Hilary N Feldman of Cambridge University’s Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour, did a formal study of the phenomenon. Feldman’s monograph, called Domestic Cats and Passive Submission, appeared in the journal Animal Behaviour.

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

Read it.

Stephen Stigler has a cool piece on a machine that Francis Galton built in 1877 that calculated a posterior distribution from a prior and a likelihood function. Galton’s originality continues to astound.

If you don’t know what that means, trust me, it’s useful. Being able to do it with a machine is astonishing.

Bryan Caplan contemplates the Axis of Drivel.

By and large, I think news is a waste of time.  If I want to increase my factual knowledge, I read history – or Wikipedia.  News, I like to say, is the lie that something important happens every day.

Read it.

But we’ll never do it, because the designs the govocrats choose are typically both PC and fugly and people won’t use them.

Read it.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Jerry Pournelle has a great idea:

I wonder what would happen if the US demanded of Gaddafi that he turn over Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi for trial in the US? Al-Megrahi was released from imprisonment in Scotland on compassi0nate grounds because he was supposedly dying of prostate cancer, and should be allowed to go home and die. That was some time ago, and he has miraculously recovered his health. President Obama keeps looking for terrorists to try in the regular US courts: Megrahi would seem to be a good candidate.  Failure to turn him over to us for trial would be as good a casus belli as any, better than we had against Saddam Hussein after 9/11.

Teddy Roosevelt would definitely do it.

Reagan might do it. Bush might do it. Hell, even Hillary might do it.

But Obama, alas, would never do it.

Read it.

Arrrrr.

Even Wikipedia thinks that flying in the U.S. sucks.

Read it.

“The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.”

Note the source. It isn’t from a religious leader, or some religious think-tank. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is an instrument of the Chinese Communist government which spends a not inconsiderable amount of time and money persecuting Christians and is officially atheistic.

Read it.

Mandy is one of a growing number of people who pretend to suffer illness and trauma to get sympathy from online support groups. Think of Tyler Durden and Marla Singer in Fight Club, only these support groups are virtual, and the people deceived are real. From cancer forums to anorexia websites, LiveJournal to Mumsnet, trusting communities are falling victim to a new kind of online fraud, one in which people are scammed out of their time and emotion instead of their money. The fakers have nothing to gain from their lies – except attention.

Read it.

Ruh-Roh.

The festival is held in the state’s Yorke Peninsula region, which was populated by Cornish miners who came to work in the region’s copper mines.

Read it.

Brooks’ constant, unsubstantiated and strangely vague attacks on conservatives as a group – in which he claimed membership, until quite recently – put me in mind of something George MacDonald Fraser has his protagonist say in one of the Flashman novels: “I’m not a sabre expert…and if I have to use one I’d rather it wasn’t in single combat, but in a melee, where you can hang about on the outskirts, roaring your heart out and waiting for an opponent with his back turned.”

I don’t like David Brooks much.

Read it.

“While it’s very rare, this spider’s distinguishing characteristic is that it likes the smell of gasoline, caused by the hydrogen oxide,” said Mitsuhiro Kunisawa, an automotive journalist.

Read it.

I am prepared to argue that any nation that still has ‘tribes’ ought to be administered by a more civilized country until they catch up with the rest of us.

Steve Sailer critiques Bill Gates.

For the last dozen years, I’ve listened to Bill Gates explain how to improve education. First, it was small learning communities (which he now says the Gates Foundation wasted $2 billion upon), then it was making everybody pass Algebra II to graduate from high school, then it was something else, now it’s giving the best teachers bigger classes (see Gates’s latest op-ed: “How Teacher Development Could Revolutionize Our Schools”).

The weird thing is that the Way to Fix the Schools has basically never been, according to Gates, about the main way the rest of economy gets more productive — and also the one thing Bill Gates definitely knows a lot about: information technology.

And look: Steve agrees with me:

And yet, common sense says that information technology offers the main hope of us ever being able to afford on a mass scale the one educational tool that works more often than anything else, especially with math: individualized tutoring. It often doesn’t work, but over thousands of years it’s tended to work enough that that’s what rich people get for their kids. And it’s a lot more likely to work than the latest fad.

Read it.

Unlike pretty much any other publication, all of the writing for these publications is done for free. Hell, in some subjects and for some journals, you actually have to pay to submit your papers. The “peer review” is all done for free and often any editing is done for free by an academic to build his or her reputation and CV. So, basically, you have just a tiny fraction of the costs of most any other publication, and yet, the mega-publishers behind these journals charge ridiculous amounts for subscriptions and even for single articles. Even worse, a significant percentage of academic research is still heavily funded by the US government (our taxpayer dollars), yet much of it is locked up behind these incredibly high prices. In many cases, the journals forbid the researcher from releasing the paper elsewhere (though many academics, thankfully, ignore this and offer up PDF downloads). NIH now requires research it funded to be publicly published a year after its published in a proprietary journal, and there are efforts to expand that to other government funding as well — but the publishers have lobbied very hard against this, and even wish to repeal the NIH rule.

The swine. This is what the historical fiction of ‘intellectual property’ leads to — a worse life for all of us.

Read it.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

It was entirely predictable — and predicted — that if a black Democrat were ever elected President, he would spend most of his time claiming that any opposition to his policies was rooted in racism. There are no surprises with Obama. If he spent as much time being President as he does being black, the country would be much better off.

Read it.

The plaintiff’s bar has plenty to do with this silly — and costly — trend. Sham product-liability cases can rack up very real damages. In 2007 the median jury award in product liability cases was just north of $1.9 million, estimates Jury Verdict Research, which tracks results of personal-injury claims.

“America’s legal system is based on the fact that there are some things so obvious that you don’t need to warn about [them],” says Bob Dorigo Jones, senior fellow for the Foundation for Fair Civil Justice, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the American legal system. Still, he adds, “it doesn’t stop people from suing because the legal system has become a litigation lottery.”

Read it.

Life imitates Art.

Read it.

One of the benefits of living in a modern industrial society is the people have the disposable income to indulge themselves in this sort of thing.

Read it.

And, bright fellow that he is, he agrees with me:

Piracy is not theft. If you steal a car, the original is lost. If you copy a game, there are simply more of them in the world.

Will Wilkinson is on the case.

University of Virginia professor of psychology Jonathan Haidt (rhymes with “kite”) recently argued in a keynote address at a conference of social psychologists that his field and theirs, a strongly left-leaning discipline that specializes in detecting prejudice and discrimination invisible to the untrained eye, may be itself guilty of subtle bigotry. After all, Haidt asked, shouldn’t there be some conservative social psychologists? At least a few? (A show of hands at Haidt’s lecture revealed just three self-described conservatives among about 1000 assembled psychologists.) The statistical improbability of this near-total absence of conservatives in social psychology suggests that the discipline may be less-than-welcoming to young Republicans.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

But, of course, it is by no means clear that ethics or social justice are the sort of things about which there are truths at all, much less the kind of truths accessible by impartial inquirers employing standard scientific methods. In any case, scientists have, let us say, a checkered record in this regard. From the dawn of the 20th century through the 1930s many of America’s most eminent progressive scientists were enthusiastic eugenicists. And not a few of last century’s “best minds in science” were advocates of communism–a system of “intergroup relations” that that killed upwards of 100 million people. Does Jost suppose that the political consensus of those more recently socialized into the scientific community should be assumed to be less disastrously misguided because science has at long last uncovered the truth about ethics? Did I miss the write-up in Scientific American?

Do tell.

Read it.

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

Read it.

A little while ago we talked about some international law issues related to S.H.I.E.L.D. This time we’re going to talk about the stories where superpowered characters wind up actually running countries, and some of them quite peculiar countries at that.

Who says lawyers don’t have fun?