Laura Bennett, Assistant Literary Editor of The New Republic, plays the gender card.

It is easy to forget that beneath all the mentions of wide hips and “terror burps” she is actually an attractive, powerful woman. Lorne Michaels once said about her that “She has such a German work ethic … It’s superhuman, the German thing of ‘This will happen and I am going to make this happen.’ It’s just sheer force of will.” In her account of herself, however, Fey is distilled into a mild current of anxious energy, perfectly likable and inoffensive, coasting to the top of her field on a tide of awkward charm. Neurosis, in Bossypants, is an instrument for fitting Fey into what is traditionally a man’s world.

But God help you if you stray off the PC reservation.

Fey’s non-confrontational style sets her sharply apart from other women in the business, many of whom bank on shock value for humor—Sarah Silverman, for instance, whose memoir, The Bedwetter, published last year, was spiky and loud. Silverman doesn’t so much agonize inwardly about her problems as aggressively exorcise them. In her book, she wrings laughs from serious confessions about her own troubled past, with chapter titles such as “An Emotionally Disturbed Teenager Is Given a Bottomless Well of Insanely Addictive Drugs As a Means to Improve Her Life, and Other Outstanding Achievements for the New Hampshire Mental Health Community”. Silverman has turned darkness into shtick. But Fey’s memoir is wholly cleansed of any real darkness. It preempts any probing into real frailties and flaws. Of course, this is the point; it is designed to disarm.

Lesson: If you’re not a thorough bitch (and Sarah Silverman is a thorough bitch), then you’re not a Real Woman.

Read it.

I hope I live to see this girl become Queen.

Read it.

So relax, Portland.

The study was set to explore the correlation between income inequality and mortality, but the authors found little evidence of this correlation. Instead they found that racial composition plays a key role in mortality rates. “Specifically, they show that white mortality rates are higher in states and MSA’s [“metropolitan statistical area.”] where the black population is a larger fraction of the total.”

I guess Malcolm X was right — black people really don’t like white people.

Read it.

The first thing I thought when I saw these was ‘Delta Force’. So we’ll see.

Steve Sailer really doesn’t like John McCain.

Remember when John McCain rattled his saber after Georgia attacked Russian-controlled turf in 2008? Aren’t you sad he didn’t get elected and thus we haven’t even come close to getting into a war with Russia?

Upside of Afghanistan: Fall of the Soviet Empire. Downside of Afghanistan: 9/11.

But what’s the upside of Libya? Fall of the Libyan Empire?

Some of these heroic rebels have hit speeds upwards of 100 mph while fleeing Gaddafi’s crack mercenaries from Burkina Faso. You gotta be brave to drive that fast on those roads.

Read it.

President Obama declared today’s 41st annual Earth Day proof of America’s ecological and conservation spirit—then completed a three-day campaign-style trip logging 10,666 miles on Air Force One, eating up some 53,300 gallons at a cost of about $180,000. And that doesn’t include the fuel consumption of his helicopter, limo, or the 29 other vehicles that travel with that car.

Of course. Rules are for the little people.

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The decision to issue travel documents to the Tunisians and other Arab migrants has triggered a French warning over the 1995 treaty.

Read it.

The system of PhD education in the United States and many other countries is broken and unsustainable, and needs to be reconceived. In many fields, it creates only a cruel fantasy of future employment that promotes the self-interest of faculty members at the expense of students. The reality is that there are very few jobs for people who might have spent up to 12 years on their degrees.

Most doctoral-education programmes conform to a model defined in European universities during the Middle Ages, in which education is a process of cloning that trains students to do what their mentors do. The clones now vastly outnumber their mentors. The academic job market collapsed in the 1970s, yet universities have not adjusted their admissions policies, because they need graduate students to work in laboratories and as teaching assistants. But once those students finish their education, there are no academic jobs for them.

Not to mention the fact that a lot of these ‘doctorates’ are in bullshit fields like Queer Studies and Holistic Therapy. In the Middle Ages there were a limited number of doctoral degrees, all of them professional: Medicine, Law, Theology (for those aiming to be prelates). Nowadays, professional degrees are looked down on as ‘not a real Doctor’, and these people who would have had problems surviving an undergraduate course of study in a medieval University parade around with initials after their names.

Read it.

We have people who do real work, and people who don’t. Overall, you’ll find people who do work have a tendency to — as they said when we were growing up — “see what needs doing and get it done.” People who don’t work tend to bitch about what someone should do, wait until someone gets it done, and then contribute a bunch of “ideas” in some big gab-fest about where the product of the work should go. That’s what post-industrial-revolution liberalism is: Non-producers making rules about what should be done with the items of value produced by producers.

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Does this sound like Britain to you?

Around 160 officers in full riot gear swooped on a house in the Stokes Croft area of the city at around 9.15pm to arrest four people they said were “a real threat to the local community”.

Read it.

The spark plug is the limiting factor on how “lean” – how low in fuel – the mixture can be: in order to ignite a leaner mixture the spark must be hotter, and past a certain point this destroys the electrodes.

But designers would like to make leaner-running engines as this would improve fuel economy and cut down on emissions.

Lasers would potentially offer hotter ignition, and they have other advantages too. The timing of ignition would be more precise than with sparkplugs – on the very brief timescales over which cylinder mixtures change, the exact point at which a plug will spark is quite unpredictable.

Read it.

In a statement released yesterday, Musk and SpaceX also make the bold claim that the Dragon, once fitted with modifications that the company is now developing under NASA contract, would also be able to land “almost anywhere on Earth or another planet with pinpoint accuracy, overcoming the limitation of a winged architecture that works only in Earth’s atmosphere” (our emphasis).

I’m sorry, but ‘Elon Musk’ sounds like something from Chanel.

Read it. And watch the video.

Read it.

Read it.

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

Read it.

The rich and powerful should be required by law to spend some time every year helping the poor and needy, the Archbishop of Canterbury suggested today.

Ever notice how some people have a lot of enthusiasm for schemes that make other people do stuff? By law? (Yeah, I’m lookin’ at YOU, Barack.)

Read it.

He’d better steer clear of Washington, D.C, then.

Cringely meets the Common Man.

I was in Los Angeles last Friday for TV meetings and lost my iPhone 4. It was on my belt and suddenly it wasn’t. Then in one of those deja vu experiences I noticed that I was only steps from an Apple Store, so I went inside to trace my iPhone using the Where is my iPhone? app. But my iPhone was nowhere.

Understand it was fully-charged and I had been using it less than 10 minutes before. My phone was nowhere to be found.

Sadly the kids at the Apple Store knew far too well what had happened because they hear the story every day. My phone was most likely stolen straight from its clip on my belt by a professional iPhone 4 thief. The moment it was grabbed from my belt the thief handed it to an accomplice. Within a minute the phone was powered-off and untraceable. They didn’t want my data, just my iPhone.

My friend Bill, hearing my story, said it is even worse in New York where thieves will steal the iPhone 4 right out of your hand, running off into the inevitable crowd of pedestrians. That will teach us not to use our mobile smart phones when, well, mobile.

From purse snatching to phone snatching. Next we’ll see iPhones on those wire tethers they use in paranoid companies to secure computer equipment.

Read it.

A British tourist survived after Norwegian paramedics accidentally tipped the sick woman into the North Sea in sub-zero conditions as they stretchered her off a cruise ship.

Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it does not.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, chides modern business.

Stopped in at my local office-supplies megastore for some printer ink cartridges. Total expenditure: $47.78. Total length of printed receipt: 34^1/2 inches—nearly a yard.

Been there, done that. (Target, I’m looking at you.)

Having torn off and tossed the bottom 25 inches of that receipt (I need the top part to claim as a business expense; clutter-reduction has its limits), I am in theory poorer by ten dollars, or ten dollars’ worth of the relevant SKU codes, but I don’t care. If you want to boil the thing down to behavioral economics, I’ve paid ten dollars for a little simplicity in my life.

Hear, hear.

Read it.

Cargo-cult politics: Dress like a superhero and you’ll be a superhero! What could be simpler?

Workforce Central Florida spent more than $14,000 on the red capes as part of its ‘Cape-A-Bility Challenge’ public relations campaign.

The campaign featured a cartoon character, ‘Dr Evil Unemployment,’ who needs to be vanquished.

I guess Florida is hiring its civil servants from former Sesame Street employees — that, and it thinks that the unemployed are mentally deficient. Hm. They may have something there.

(Of course, Edna Mode showed us why capes are a stupid idea for superheros. And a state agency would never adopt a stupid idea, would it?)

The Other McCain really doesn’t like the French.

Read it.

Freeberg stops the train for a moment.

In fact, is anybody in America in danger of starving to death because their salaries & wages are too much on the skimpy side? Any kids with swollen bellies in American cities, desperately trying to catch rats & pigeons so their starving bodies can get some protein?

I shouldn’t be able to find any poor people with big teevee sets, right? Certainly, no poor people with teevee sets bigger than those owned by some of the “wealthy” taxpayers who subsidize them? Does my social studies teacher’s argument still hold water if the waitress’ kid wears $300 sneakers to school? What if the waitress has a $500 tattoo?

My point is that when some of them are…and that is undoubtedly the case…we are no longer talking about money required for survival. The necessities of survival have, in one way or another, been provided, thus freeing up the cash for these non-staple items. And I don’t necessarily have a problem with that either. Other than this: Don’t characterize it as a discussion about what’s needed to survive, when that is not what we’re really talking about.

Also, 45% is awfully close to 50%. If half of us are not paying any income tax at all, and the matter being referred to the electorate is “should we provide more alms,” then the “we” in that question has lost all practical meaning. If it’s a minority among the electorate doing the providing the question becomes more like one of “should we make those guys over there give us more stuff?”

Read it.

Read it.

In the early 1900s, scientists discovered that each person belonged to one of four blood types. Now they have discovered a new way to classify humanity: by bacteria. Each human being is host to thousands of different species of microbes. Yet a group of scientists now report just three distinct ecosystems in the guts of people they have studied.

Judging by recent history, there will soon be a dating service to match people by their gut type.

Read it. And watch the video.

For this year’s Earth Day celebration, Reason.tv is proud to present “The Top Five Environmental Disasters that Didn’t Happen.” The environmental movement began in 1962 when Rachel Carson published her best-selling book Silent Spring. And ever since, chicken littles have warned us about imminent environmental disasters that ultimately didn’t happen.

Radley Balko sums it up.

CNN recently obtained a list of the “behavioral indicators” that could subject you to an enhanced security screeing by TSA. Included on the list:

Passengers who display arrogance and verbally express contempt for security procedures.

Because terrorists are known for drawing attention to themselves by irritating security screeners? Seems doubtful.

The lesson here: Not only will you be subjected to a pointless, hassling, sometimes humiliating screening process every time you fly, but you’ll also now need to pretend like you’re enjoying it.

Freeberg creates a new word.

One who begins with the end in mind, such that his vision of the end result is strong, steely and unshakable, like a metal hook sunk deep into a granite wall; while any the variables involved in getting there are outside of his concern. These people can be hazardous to the success of a project if they know barely enough about the details to monopolize the political power. The tendency is for them to envision the completion of some “favorite” minor task, as the end delivery product, so their “grappling hook” vision concerns the completion of some relatively minor task rather than the completion of the overall project itself. Their knowledge is deep but narrow.

An excellent coinage, but awkward. I suggest ‘hook-head’ as being more pithy and so more likely to achieve widespread adoption.

Read it.

Read it.

Last week an Iraqi Muslim scholar issued a fatwa that, among other barbarities, asserts that “it is permissible to spill the blood of Iraqi Christians.”  Inciting as the fatwa is, it is also redundant.  While last October’s Baghdad church attack which killed some sixty Christians is widely known—actually receiving some MSM coverage—the fact is, Christian life in Iraq has been a living hell ever since U.S. forces ousted the late Saddam Hussein in 2003.

So, how much money have we spent on that place so far? And we didn’t even get any oil out of it.

Read it.

A man who was plainly an invincible ninja warrior or similar tangled with police in Maryland recently. The sword-wielding scofflaw successfully resisted ordinary meatbag cops, a police robot, gassing with a “chemical agent” and a volley of low-velocity cosh projectiles from a SWAT team before finally succumbing to the crippling electric current of a Taser stun weapon.

Read it.

Both became exhibits at the Cairo museum, but when it was broken into during the recent uprising, the bronze instrument vanished. Luckily, the silver one was away on exhibition tour.

Egyptologists were already reeling from the loss of many of the country’s antiquities, and many found the theft of one of the oldest surviving musical instruments in the world particularly poignant.

And this is why the Elgin Marbles are better off in the British Museum rather than back in Greece.

Read it.

A dating service set up by biology students in Munich, Germany is testing subjects’ DNA to find the most compatible gene pools.

Yup, those wacky Germans are at it again.

Read it.

Belgium has won Guinness World Records recognition as the country with the longest time without government as it approaches a year of life without elected rulers.

And the fact that nobody else appears to have noticed ought to tell you something about the essential, absolutely essential nature of government in the modern world.

Read it.

A student was murdered in her bedroom in Canada as she chatted to her boyfriend on webcam, who watched, powerless, as the attack unfolded.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Despite the endless series of black on white murders, you never see a single story in the media that says that whites were killed by blacks. Nor will you ever see a statement by a public official saying, “Whites are in danger from black criminals and gangs. Avoid all-black areas or exercise extreme caution if you must go there.” The low-level black-on-white intifada continues, never identified as such, but known only by the silent photos of the perpetrators and victims and by code words such as “gangs” and “flash mobs.” And so naive whites, unwarned by their society and trained to believe that it is evil to think that race matters, keep delivering themselves into the maw of death.

Read it.

You know you want one.

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Must have been a Muslim; everyone knows that no Christian would have the balls to do something like that.

No, I take that back; Muslims would have blown up the building.

Read it.

Read it.

No, the biggest problem is that half the people who use it are from the left-hand side of the bell curve.

That said, of course tweets are ads. Whenever you have a medium of communication, there’s a certain portion of the population who are going to use that to try to get you to give them money, either for legitimate goods and services or for scams like Nigerian bank transfers or the ‘Democratic’ Party. Like spam, tweets are essentially free, so there’s nothing to prevent you from flooding the world except your own good manners (good luck with that). People who are trying to make money have much more incentive to participate in the ‘tragedy of the commons’ than normal people have to communicate, and eventually the noise drowns out the signal.

‘You can’t stop the signal, Mal.’

No, but you can sure as hell drown it out.

Read it.

The first new guidelines for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease in nearly 30 years establish earlier stages of the mind-robbing disease, paving the way for spotting and possibly treating these conditions much sooner than they are now.

Because, of course, God forbid that anyone treat the disease unless there are guidelines in place.

The change reflects a modern view that Alzheimer’s is a spectrum of mental decline, with damage that can start many years before symptoms appear. The new guidance describes three phases: early brain changes, mild cognitive impairment and full-blown Alzheimer’s.

Sounds like Congress to me.

Read it. And watch the video.

Imagine John Boehner or Harry Reid trying that. (On second thought: Don’t.)

Read it.

I concluded last Saturday’s report with an account of the granting of temporary residence visas to the Tunisian immigrants at the Ventimiglia refugee camp in Italy. Ventimiglia is a short distance from the border with France, and many of the Tunisians have relatives in France. As a result, as soon as they leave Ventimiglia, they attempt to cross the border.

Every body knows this. The French know it and the Italians know it. Those temporary visas serve as “passports”, and the Italians think they should allow migrants free access to the entire Schengen Area. However, the rest of the EU disagrees, especially France. By granting visas to the migrants, Italy is saying, in effect: “OK, France — we’re going to help these culture-enrichers get into the Promised Land in France. What are you going to do about it?”

The French promptly demonstrated just exactly what they were going to do about it: yesterday they stopped Italian trains from crossing the border at Ventimiglia.

I don’t suppose anybody would consider, oh, shipping them back to North Africa. No, I suppose not.

Kay Hymowitz reveals a dirty little secret.

Not so long ago, highly educated women were a spinster class; men with degrees looked for wives whose talents ran towards cooking the dinner roast and doing the children’s laundry, not writing briefs. No longer. Women with advanced degrees are now as likely to marry as their less-educated sisters (though they are less likely to have children) in large part because educated men are choosing them over secretaries or nurses. Today about 55% of married couples have the same educational level.

Educated men and women are drawn to spouses they think will help them produce the children likely to thrive in the contemporary knowledge-based economy. That means high IQ, ambitious, and organized kids who will do their homework and take a lot of AP courses. The preference for alpha kids is the reason there is a luxury market for Ivy League egg and sperm donors. It also explains why, though we don’t have solid research distinguishing between elite and State U mating choices, Ms. Harvard will probably not accept a proposal from Mr. Florida State. The economist Greg Mankiw has quipped that “Harvard is probably the world’s most elite dating agency.” A glance at the New York Times nuptial pages suggests he’s right.

Read it.

My question is: How can you tell?

Daniel Pipes lays it out.

Further support for my thesis that Islam is of Satanic origin.

Read it.

I SO wish I’d had these in college….

Read it.

Mark this day, folks, because the brainiacs have finally made a breakthrough in quantum teleportation: a team of scientists from Australia and Japan have successfully transferred a complex set of quantum data in light form

Read it.

What we are seeing here is not exactly a mystery. Incomes that average $345 million are nearly all capital gains; no one I know of makes anything like that in ordinary income. The capital gains rate was 28 percent in 1992 and 15 percent in 2007. So, with a capital gains rate of 28 percent, the average overall federal tax rate was 26 percent, and with a capital gains rate of 15 percent, the average overall federal tax rate was 17 percent. In both years, the vast majority of the highest earners’ income consisted of capital gains. (In 1992 the top rate on ordinary income was 31 percent, while it was 35 percent in 2007, which presumably accounts for most of the rest of the variation in total federal taxes paid as a percentage of adjusted gross income.)

Some will say that in the present crisis extreme measures are necessary, so let’s emulate Willie Sutton and take the money from the people who have it– the super rich. Indeed, President Obama suggests, more or less obliquely, that this is his alternative to getting federal spending under control.

To test this proposal, let’s do the math. Four hundred “super rich” times an average adjusted gross income of $345 million equals $138 billion. That is around 1/27 of the current year’s federal spending of $3.8 trillion. Which means that if the Democrats stole every penny of income earned by the super rich, it would fuel the out-of-control federal behemoth for a little under two weeks. Thirteen days into the fiscal year, we would be on our own. And we wouldn’t have the super rich to kick around anymore.