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My mother’s father came from Benton Harbor, so I’m somewhat interested in this.

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The Finnish parliamentary elections coming up this weekend just keep on getting ever more hilarious, the desperation and anger of the watermelon Greens (the urban SWPL party that has long ago kicked out anyone who can tell a crow from a magpie) starting to boil over. The Greens are trying to frame this election as an epic battle between them as the cosmopolitan and enlightened forces of light versus those dumb and uneducated reactionaries (as somebody quipped, “We are intellectual opposites: we are intellectual, and you are the opposite”) who are trying to bitterly cling to an idealized past. I mean, that is pretty damn rich coming from the party whose every social, cultural and economic goal can essentially be summed up as return to the small tribal societies of the Pleistocene. Greens also like to bang their own drum of how “tolerant”, “humane” and “open-minded” they are towards different views, which is also quite hilarious in light of not only their open hatred of both sexual and speech freedoms of straight middle-aged men, but also the fact that despite 40% of their voters supporting nuclear power, not even one of their candidates supports nuclear power. I mean, really, with a couple hundred candidates across the nation, how astronomically long would the odds of such complete uniformity of thought be in a party of independent individuals?

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Europe discovers that it actually has nations after all.

Italy infuriated the French last week by giving out temporary residence visas, allowing the immigrants to travel in the European Union.

Many want to go to France because they speak French, and because they believe that President Nicolas Sarkozy’s approach to the war in Libya means he will be sympathetic to them.

But the French government insists it will only allow in those with the financial resources to live in France independently – a requirement which rules out most of those who have fled to Europe.

Heh.

Security has been stepped up right across the Franco-Italian border, including along ancient foot paths linking the two countries.

Italian officials have confirmed that thousands of immigrants have been arrested by the French and then sent back to them over the past few weeks.

Gee, imagine that.

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Design and engineering firm PEGA comes to your rescue with a new composite material made of recycled paper and polypropylene alloy. Lightweight, durable, and inexpensive to produce, it acts just like typical ABS plastic — and it even comes in the classic soul-killing beige.

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As I tell my constitutional law students, Congress’s ultimate power is the power of the purse. If Congress objects, for example, to military action engaged in by the president, it can simply refuse to allocate funds.

But the Obama Administration’s position seems to be that so long as it issues a signing statement refusing to abide by restrictions on funding that it deems to interfere with executive prerogatives, it can simply create the funding out of thin air. If there is no statutory funding for the czars, where exactly is the money coming from?

Well, from us, of course. After all, it’s the government’s money, right? They just magnanimously allow us to keep some of it. Usually.

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A suicide bomber in an Afghan army uniform killed five foreign and four Afghan soldiers on Saturday at a sprawling desert base in the east of the country.

This just underlines the common anti-jihadist trope that there is no way to distinguish a Muslim who will blow you up from a Muslim who won’t. Killing non-Muslims is perfectly compatible with Islamic teaching, and for a substantial portion of the Muslim population a positive duty.

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Let’s ponder what this means. If politicians in Washington spend too much and cause more red ink, which happens on a routine basis, Obama wants a provision that automatically would raise taxes on the American people.

Kind of like the we-get-a-raise-automatically-unless-we-vote-not-to law now in effect regarding Congressional pay.

Smitty at The Other McCain lets it loose.

Here is a better idea: repeal the 17th Amendment. Let the Senate return to representing the States. The States can treat Senate nominations like the President treats Supreme Court nominations. If the citizens want the Senate to change, let them tell their Governor/Legislature when their terms are up.

I submit that admitting that 1913 was an abso-effing-lutely suck-tacular year for the US Constitution, and unwinding the ill deeds undertaken by Woodrow Fascist Wilson is crucial to letting the Progressive State of America experiment die its dismal death.

On a related note, Hot Air wants to know where the 5 minute tax form is. Going back to 1913, we need to repeal the 16th Amendment. There is no hope with the IRS. None. Nothing but byzantine pettifoggery there. We nix the IRS, and let the States figure out how to raise their allotted portion of the Federal tab.

All excellent ideas.

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There are three major components to the Islamic strategy for overcoming the infidel democracies: the Ummah, Dawah, and Jihad. Each is necessary for Islamic success, but Jihad is the final stroke, and consumes far less time, resources, and manpower than the other two.

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For those of you designing games — which I’m sure practically all of you are.

Watch it.

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The Worrying Class in developed countries laments: “We don’t make anything any more.”

The United States alone produces roughly 20% of all the world’s manufactured goods. We may not make many toys or cell phones any more, but we do make most of the world’s artificial knees and hips, medical scanners and jet aircraft. Those sound like good jobs to me.

Manufacturing fetishists also ignore the fact that many factory jobs were actually not very good jobs at all.

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What she was convicted of was raising and pooling money outside the official system, which is common among Chinese entrepreneurs. There has been much speculation about why she was singled out. Perhaps it was that her promises to investors of annual returns of up to 80% seemed just too good, to the authorities, to be genuine. It is also possible that she lent on the money she received at even higher rates, and the borrowers, unable to pay, used their political connections to have her arrested.

Uh, guys? They’re still Communists.

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Here’s a little snippet of news from the Netherlands that’s worth pondering. The inexorable logic of Western “diversity”, “tolerance”, and “human rights” produces the following sequence of events:

An illegal immigrant — a failed asylum seeker — kills a policeman. After he is convicted of the crime, he cannot be deported, because his nationality is unknown. If the judicial system is lenient and compassionate with him — as is often the case in Europe — he will spend a relatively short time behind bars. When he is released, the entire sequence of events can be repeated indefinitely.

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The great struggle in Japanese national security policy since World War II has been over the legitimacy of its armed forces. For more than half a century, constitutional restrictions on the deployment of the military have led to the world’s second-largest democratic economy playing a far smaller global role than its peers. Efforts to change that have always faced implacable resistance from a Japanese public scarred by the war and suspicious of any hint of militarism.

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But of course ‘Star Wars’ has never worked, doesn’t work, and can never work. Just ask the New York Times.

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A seemingly innocuous headline in Thursday’s Financial Times has ominous overtones. “Wall St executives enter debt debate,” it said, but the first sentence of the article reads, “The Obama administration is trying to enlist Wall Street executives in the debate over increasing the debt ceiling and convince congressional Republicans that a U.S. default would be catastrophic for the markets.” In the past, there was nothing strange about the idea that financial specialists might be enlisted to help guide congressional policy, but in the era of the Dodd-Frank Act, it is necessary to consider whether these Wall Street executives are doing this voluntarily or because they fear government retaliation if they refuse.

Of course. Big Government would rather have one big firm, or a handful of big firms, that they could then regulate the hell out of (and squeeze money out of) than try to herd cats. For example: The major auto manufacturers.

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Researchers from Australia and Japan have successfully teleported wave packets of light, potentially revolutionising quantum communications and computing.

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Security officials found the body of an Italian man who had been abducted in the Gaza Strip in an abandoned house overnight Thursday, a Hamas security official said.

In a You Tube clip the group posted online earlier Thursday, a Jihadist Salafi group in Gaza aligned with al Qaida had threatened to execute Italian rights activist Vittorio Arigoni by 17:00 local time (1400 GMT) unless their leader Hesham al-Sa’eedni, whom it detained last month, was freed.

Arrigoni, an Italian pacifist and blogger, has lived in the Gaza Strip for some time. He was shown blindfolded with blood around his right eye and a hand can be seen pulling his head up by his hair to face the camera.

Arrigoni came to the Gaza Strip on a boat bringing humanitarian supplies in 2008.

Why did the scorpion sting the frog? Because that’s what scorpions do.

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I’m sure Obama’s ahead of the curve on this one.

The surprising discovery of a fossil of a sharp-toothed beast that lurked in what is now the western U.S. more than 200 million years ago is filling a gap in dinosaur evolution.

The short snout and slanting front teeth of the find _ Daemonosaurus chauliodus _ had never before been seen in a Triassic era dinosaur, said Hans-Dieter Sues of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Sues and colleagues report the discovery in Wednesday’s edition of the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Jared Diamond, Author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, discusses agriculture.

He’s agin’ it.

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Okay, let me get this straight: The original tiger species is extinct, so it’s not a case of preserving a native species. And in order for tigers to flourish, they have to reintroduce numerous other species that aren’t there right now.

My question is: Why? And, more important: Who’s paying for all this.

I suspect that the answer to the second question is: Some country’s taxpayers.

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One of many questions I am not required to deal with by avoiding the practice of law.

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I know exactly how they feel.

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Bubble sort me, baby.

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Although ‘film’ is something of a misnomer.

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I know exactly how he felt.

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A suicide bomber killed 10 people in an attack on Wednesday on peace talks between tribal elders in Afghanistan’s eastern Kunar province, a volatile area where insurgents have gained ground in recent months.

If there aren’t any Jews or Americans handy, Muslims will cheerfully blow each other up instead.

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

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An amazing collection of design disasters.

It starts, appropriately enough, with clamshell plastic packaging.

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Speaking last week at Tufts University, Pelosi said, among other things, “To my Republican friends, take back your party so that it doesn’t matter so much who wins the election because we have shared values.” In other words, it’s fine if Republicans win elections so long as they agree with us. But she couldn’t stop there. She added this: “The fact is, elections shouldn’t matter as much as they do.”

Freeze frame right there. Tom Bethell used to argue in the American Spectator that the permanent government in Washington viewed elections as a nuisance, something to be endured like summer thunderstorms that blow over in a few minutes, allowing them to get back to the job of administering the country in the name of “the common good.” Pelosi perfectly expresses in her comment the old Progressive view that “politics” and political argument should be less and less relevant to the main business of government. (This is one aspect of contemporary Progressive thought that has not changed from the old Progressives of a century ago, in contrast to the series I posted here last month.) The object of Progressivism was best expressed in Saint-Simone’s famous phrase that “the government of men should be replaced by the administration of things.” Of course, if you determine that a function of government, like traffic enforcement or tax collecting, should be beyond the reach of partisan political argument, then you have essentially ruled the other party out of order when it objects. Pelosi and confreres believe that once any welfare state measure is in place, it cannot be questioned. The tacit premise of Pelosi’s remark is that today’s Republican Party is an illegitimate party, akin to Nazis or Communists or other subversives who reject the principles of the Constitution. At best, elections to the Progressive mind would increasingly become ceremonial exercises, like Fourth of July picnics. At worst, it is an argument for tyranny.

Russ Roberts at Café Hayek spanks Joseph Stiglitz of Vanity Fair, who does the usual ‘progressive’ trick of inappropriately lumping shit together and drawing bogus conclusions therefrom.

So compared to 25 years ago, the share of income going to the top 1% has doubled, from 12% to almost 25%. But the conclusion that Stiglitz draws, does not follow. It does not follow that their lot in life has improved considerably. There’s no “their” there. The people who were in the top 1% 25 years ago are not the same people in the top 25% today. The numbers that are quoted are two snapshots at two different times. The correct statement is that the people who are in the top 1% today earn a larger share of the income pie than the people who were in the top 1% 25 years ago.

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The cast of Red Dwarf are poised to reunite for a new series of the cult TV sci-fi series, twelve years after the spacecraft finally ran out of fuel on the BBC.

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More than one in four European office workers believe that the quickest way to get a replacement phone or laptop is to destroy the one provided to them by their employer, according to a new study by online-backup provider, Mozy.

“Shockingly, over a quarter of the office workers surveyed feel that the quickest and most efficient method of replacing outdated technology, such as laptops and mobile phones, is to deliberately destroy or irreparably damage them,” concludes the study, which surveyed 600 IT managers and 3,000 employees across the UK, France, and Germany.

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In the scheme of things, saving the 38 billion bucks that Congress seems poised to agree upon is not a big deal. A big deal is saving a trillion bucks. And we could do that by preventing disease instead of treating it.

For the first time in history, lifestyle diseases like diabetes, heart disease, some cancers and others kill more people than communicable ones. Treating these diseases — and futile attempts to “cure” them — costs a fortune, more than one-seventh of our GDP.

But they’re preventable, and you prevent them the same way you cause them: lifestyle. A sane diet, along with exercise, meditation and intangibles like love prevent and even reverse disease. A sane diet alone would save us hundreds of billions of dollars and maybe more.

Of course, being a writer for the New York Times, he’s too politically correct to mention the worst ‘lifestyle disease’ of all: HIV/AIDS.

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No shit.

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Jordan on Tuesday launched the world’s largest online antiquities database, which details every archaeological site in the country and aims to help preserve its treasures. Its creators said the Web platform could be a model for Iraq, where looters have plundered its ancient heritage.

Experts said the Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities is the first such countrywide system. The site uses Geographic Information System, similar to Google Earth, to map 11,000 registered sites in the country _ and a click on each reveals inventories of what they contain and reports on their conditions.

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For those not au courant, Peter Thiel has established a bunch of fellowships to encourage bright students to start their own companies rather than prolong their adolescence in college.

Needless to say, the educational establishment is rallying ’round to nip this idea in the bud.

Sample sound bites:

Despite having appointments at five elite universities….

… not that I’m one to brag….

Peter Thiel may have made the right calls with Paypal; he certainly made a smart decision by investing in Mark Zuckerberg.  But he is no expert on education.

Uh, dude, education isn’t an end in itself, unless you’ve got a hefty trust fund or win the Tenure Track Lottery; it’s there to get a job.

The best path to success is not to drop out of college; it is to complete it.

Says the disinterested observer. This is like a government employee telling you that what you really need isn’t a job but more benefits.

Most of the deans in the audience were aghast.

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

Well, you can predict what the deans said as well as I can. There are two concepts here: education as an entity and the education establishment, an industry created to provide that entity. Needless to say, those involved in the industry providing a product are going to do their damnedest to make sure that nobody undercuts demand for their product. Like a phone company that confuses phone call with communication, these guys confuse classroom time (that we get paid for) with education. And, like the phone company, they’re in for a rough ride in the years ahead. My heat breaks for them….

The Other McCain questions Google’s priorities. Not that that’s very difficult.

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A Nigerian immigrant left his African wife and daughter in Dublin and got involved with a beautiful Polish woman whom he knocked up and had a child with. He subsequently strangled the Polish woman, then in desperation, after a standoff with the Gardai, jumped off a cliff into the sea and apparently died.

Soon to be a major motion picture, I’m thinking.

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Throughout the project, the mantra that the Central Artery had severed the city, and that its burial underground* somehow would “knit the city back together” seemed oblivious to the fact that it was not the Artery which had severed the city, really, but the demolition of over 1,000 buildings for the Artery’s right of way which had done so.  Removing the Artery simply revealed that pre-existing wound to the heart of the city, a gap so wide and poorly-defined even Baron Haussman might have thought it could use a little narrowing.

With no one able to agree on anything in particular, the environmentalists of the late 1980s stepped in to offer the compelling alternative of nothing, packaged under the name “open space,” and obtained a requirement that 75% of the land above the buried highway be set aside for it.  The realization has only recently sunk in that even “nothing” must be paid for, as the conservancy tasked with maintaining the Greenway has now proposed taxing abutting property owners to raise funds, the largesse of Boston’s citizens, already maintaining several very large parks in close proximity, apparently falling short.  Thus, land that, under private ownership, might have provided millions of dollars in tax revenue to the city, and hosted thousands of jobs and apartments, has become a money pit.

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I first show that respondents who express traditionally racist views (on segregation, interracial marriage, and inborn racial abilities) tend to support greater income redistribution. Traditional racists also tend to oppose free-market capitalism and its consequences, wanting the government to guarantee jobs for everyone and fix prices, wages, and profits. Next, I report a similar pattern for those who express intolerance for unpopular groups on the fifteen Stouffer tolerance questions (regarding racists, homosexuals, communists, extreme militarists, and atheists). Those who express less tolerance for unpopular groups tend to favor income redistribution and oppose capitalism.

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

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

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I am uncomfortable with this. I have no problem with imposing restrictions on those wearing all-encompassing coverings — no, you can’t enter any building or area that would make a juicy suicide-bomber target wearing one — but to criminalize conduct that is arguably religiously required by people who aren’t inherently inconveniencing other people seems to me to be excessive.

Kudos to the French for finally pushing back against the slow-motion Muslim conquest of Europe, of course, but I think that there are more legitimate ways to do it.

Right now I have 28 ‘starred’ items that cannot be unstarred — I can click on the star, and it goes away, but when I do a refresh, there they all are again, big as life.

My ‘home’ screen claims that I have 212 unread messages, while the ‘message’ screen denies that I have any unread mail at all.

And, of course, there is no effective feedback mechanism by which to tell Google that there’s a problem. (Oh, Google has ‘Help Forums’, but they appear to exist mainly to allow Google users a way to blow off steam — there are complaints about the ‘cannot unstar’ problem over six months old, and there is no indication that anyone at Google is even listening, much less working on it.)

UPDATE: My lurking unread messages that don’t actually exist have shrunk to 189. Perhaps it’s like a bathtub that only drains when nobody is looking. My ‘starred’ items are indestructible, however. Perhaps I ought to notify the Pentagon….

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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It is rather ironic that, last week, union bosses used the anniversary Rev. Martin Luther King’s assassination to try to drum up support for the union cause. You see, even after all these years, racism and discrimination within the walls of the House of Labor is still very real. As noted by UnionFacts.com, since 2000, there have been over 4,200 complaints filed against unions for racial discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. In some cities, it is a bigger problem than in others. However, the one area where union racism seems to rear its ugly head the most often is with the construction trade unions, where African Americans are often excluded from work.

When was the last time you saw a black plumber? Electrician? Bricklayer? Iron worker? Heavy equipment driver? Telephone lineman?

‘Look for … the union label….’

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Every level above the local becomes more and more isolated from its nominal constituency and hence more self-interested and corrupt. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy will triumph over every reality.

Conservative and Ukip MEPs voted for the cost-saving proposals but Labour and Liberal Democrat members either voted against or abstained.

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

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I remember a friend of mine getting his kids into calculus by posing the problem ‘Okay, you’ve got a ten-foot-wide corridor that right-angles into a five-foot-wide corridor. How long a spear can you get around that corner?’

It was amazing.

Moreover – and this is risky for me to say, because if this sentiment went viral I’d no longer have a job – it seems pointless to be teaching kids math en masse when we could be teaching them more programming instead.

Well, not necessarily programming, but certainly individualized instruction paced to the mental process of the student — for which programming is an excellent tool, of course; the mental discipline and structured approach to problem-solving required to write correct programs is certainly useful in many areas of life, as well.

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The success of the Iron Dome missile defense system so far – nine interceptions including the system’s first one on Thursday night – has surprised even the air defense troops who have been training to operate the device for several months. Two batteries have been deployed thus far, one north of Be’er Sheva two weeks ago and one near Ashkelon last week.

While most of the media attention has been given to the visible interceptions made over Gaza, the system actually clicks into action automatically when any projectile is launched from Gaza toward Israel. The commanders of the Iron Dome batteries were therefore faced with making dozens of real-time decisions on whether or not to fire an intercepting missile.