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In Korematsu v. United States (1944), the U.S Supreme Court, packed to the hilt with 8 justices appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, upheld FDR’s notorious Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced internment of Japanese-Americans as a matter of “military urgency” during World War II. It’s an ugly decision and the full story is even worse. As The Los Angeles Times reports, Neal Katyal, the acting solicitor general for the Obama administration, has admitted that one of his predecessors, FDR’s Solicitor General Charles Fahy, deliberately misled the Supreme Court in the case.

Well, he was a Democrat.

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In this Article, I invite the reader to indulge in a thought experiment. What would the world look like if, instead of assigning prisoners to particular prisons bureaucratically, we gave them vouchers, good for one incarceration, that they were required to redeem at a participating prison?

Many lawyers have entirely too much time on their hands. Many of these lawyers have as their day job teaching people to become lawyers. Don’t know how you feel about that, but it scares the shit out of me at times.

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For $199, the Nike Plus Sportswatch GPS is a smart watch that tells you how far you’ve gone, how fast and how often. The watch, which is powered by navigation company TomTom, also knows where you’ve been. It tells you how many calories you’ve burned and reminds you to run if you haven’t been running in a few days. Wonderfully, it also tells time.

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In the 2008 presidential campaign Barack Obama served up President Kennedy’s conference with Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961 as support for his thought that it would be a good idea for the president to meet unconditionally with leaders of the Iranian regime. As is so often the case when it comes to history, however, Obama didn’t know what he was talking about. By all accounts — and I mean all accounts — including Kennedy’s own, the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit in Vienna was a disaster. Historians continue to add to the record, but the record has been clear on this point for a very long time.

Here, of course, ‘blinked’ is a code word for ‘had it packed up his pooper’. Khruschev’s ability to roll Kennedy in Vienna directly led to the Cuban missile crisis.

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Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers’ lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?

By the time I finally retired in 1991, I had more than enough reason to think of our schools – with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers – as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness – curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight – simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.

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What differentiates Coursification from other course management and online learning platforms is that it helps teachers offer a tailored, personalized curriculum to each student based on their performance and learning schedule. Each online course begins with a diagnostic assessment that identifies student learning gaps (specialized to the subject). After the diagnostic test, each student receives a personalized study schedule, which the teacher can simply import into the platform. The schedule is customized based on student proficiencies and the duration of the course.

At last, some attempt is being made to leverage technology to automate the educational process.

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PC MC is fundamentally incoherent, but since most people never examine it in detail, or even consciously, the essential irrationality never has to be addressed.

Some highlights:

• No culture is better than another — but modern Western culture is bad, and all non-Western cultures are superior.
• To consider the distinct characteristics of different genetic groups is racist — but white people are inherently xenophobic and intolerant compared with “brown” people.
• Islam is a religion, not a race — but people who object to Islam are racists.
• Violence, even in self-defense, is never justified — yet the violence of Muslims and other “brown” people must not be judged, but rather understood within its cultural context.

And so forth.

PC MC requires its adherents to practice doublethink constantly, in order to entertain all these diametrically opposed notions. All races are equal, but white people are especially bad. In order to promote equality, we must treat people unequally, with straight white men receiving the worst treatment of all.

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A Bangladeshi woman cut off a man’s penis during an alleged attempt to rape her and took it to a police station as evidence.

You go, girl.

Iowahawk is on the case.

I have never been much of a community activist, but I can no longer sit idly while America remains at risk of attack by the most nefarious identity thief in the history of Internet. And cheap page views are to be had.

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Note the assumption that Arabs have any interest at all in democracy. (Well, it’s the New York Times; they kinda have to assume that….)

This chronic weakness of civil society suggests that viable Arab democracies — or leaders who could govern them — will not emerge anytime soon. The more likely immediate outcome of the current turmoil is a new set of dictators or single-party regimes.

If Arabs get to vote at all, they don’t vote for the best candidate, or even for the candidate of a particular party; they vote for Uncle Achmed, on the assumption that when Uncle Achmed gets in office (and his hands on that office’s budget), he’ll pass out the patronage.

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These days, it is all about the money. The ability to dictate hiring equals the ability to come through for constituencies who have contributed many millions of dollars to the Democratic Party’s coffers. Quotas mean dollars, so they will continue unless and until the majority of Americans understand what is happening and care enough to change it.

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

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Obviously the last year in which Congressmen had skills other than wasting taxpayers’ money and lying to the public in order to get re-elected.

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Ball’s in your court, Steve.

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Massive collection of cheap sound effects.

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

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Prof Steve Jones, one of Britain’s most eminent scientists, has warned that the level of inbreeding among the nation’s Muslims is endangering the health of future generations.

He added: “Bradford is very inbred. There is a huge amount of cousins marrying each other there.” Research in Bradford has found that babies born to Pakistani women are twice as likely to die in their first year as babies born to white mothers, with genetic problems linked to inbreeding identified as a “significant” cause.

Studies have found that within the city, more than 70 per cent of marriages are between relations, with more than half involving first cousins.

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Harrison Schmitt, a former U.S. Senator from New Mexico and Apollo Astronaut, says although “NASA’s had a good 50-year run,” it’s now time for a change.

Schmitt is proposing to start from scratch, by taking NASA’s deep space exploration efforts and putting them in a new agency. That agency, which Schmitt has dubbed the National Space Exploration Agency, or NSEA, would focus on missions to the moon and beyond.

Or, better yet, we could leave it to private enterprise, which is doing a great job without burdening the taxpayers.

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For more than 15 years, New York State has led the country in domestic outmigration: for every American who comes to New York, roughly two depart for other states. This outmigration slowed briefly following the onset of the Great Recession. But a new Marist poll released last week suggests that the rate is likely to increase: 36 percent of New Yorkers under 30 are planning to leave over the next five years. Why are all these people fleeing?

For one thing, according to a recent survey in Chief Executive, New York State has the second-worst business climate in the country. (Only California ranks lower.) People go where the jobs are, so when a state repels businesses, it repels residents, too. It’s also telling that in the Marist poll, 62 percent of New Yorkers planning to leave cited economic factors—including cost of living (30 percent), taxes (19 percent), and the job environment (10 percent)—as the primary reason.

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I can’t help feeling that, here and elsewhere, Gilbert knew exactly what he was saying. “Where is Mrs Gilbert?” he once asked at the Savoy Theatre. “She’s round behind,” came the reply. “I know,” said Gilbert, “but where is she?” A member of the audience, seeing him standing in the foyer after one performance, mistook the dramatist for a commissionaire and brusquely ordered him to call him a cab. “Certainly,” said Gilbert, “you’re a four-wheeler.” “What!” exclaimed the man. “Well,” said Gilbert, “I certainly wouldn’t call you hansom.”

The Other McCain appreciates one of life’s little ironies.

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That plus Romneycare means I don’t vote for Romney, not nowhere, not nohow.

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Most options for wood used in decks, outdoor furniture and siding are rarely entirely earth friendly, since they are often treated with heavy metals or toxic chemicals, or logged from unsustainable forests. One company is innovating in the space by altering the chemistry of the wood itself to make it weather and decay resistant.

This is really exciting stuff.

Accoya could be used in place of pressure-treated wood, although Ayala said the company sees itself as more competitive with tropical hardwoods such as teak and ipe. According to the company, Accoya wood requires less maintenance than its tropical counterparts, and comes with a 50-year warranty for wood used above ground.

I have this vision of a world full of paint-free wood.

“No natural moisture can penetrate that wood,” Halvarson said. “If you try and put a water based stain on it, it won’t take at all, but an oil based stain will wick all the way through the wood from one side to the other.” Since the wood is treated from the inside out, it can be cut and modified in a variety of ways without compromising protection.

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The only free speech at Yale is speech in line with the Politically Correct narrative embraced by the Crust. It was so when I arrived there in 1974 and has only gotten worse since.

Freeberg has it right.

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The company’s restructuring allowed it to wash away legal responsibility for car-accident victims who had won damages or had pending lawsuits before its bankruptcy filing. The same holds true for General Motors Co., which discarded the liabilities as part of its own $50 billion bailout and restructuring.

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Batteries and motors are heavy and inefficient in that they expend a significant percentage of their power just moving their own mass. This is especially apparent in climbing robots, which spend most of their time hoisting themselves vertically upward. Researchers from Zhejiang University in China have developed a robot that’s capable of sticking to smooth surfaces, climbing vertically, and washing windows, relying almost entirely on water pressure.

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I am not making this up.

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The National Museum of Computing has finished restoring a Tunny machine – a key part of Allied code-cracking during World War II.

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Students banned from a Central Coast school for wearing a white t-shirt. On Wednesday, Soquel High School suspended at least two students. The students say it’s because of allegations, they’re part of a white supremacist group.

And of course if you ask school officials for an explanation they dodge any accountability by citing ‘student privacy rights’.

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David Brooks, who comes in for a lot of criticism around here, makes an excellent point in his latest column: “This week, Senate Democrats voted on four separate budget proposals and not a single Democrat voted for a single one. Even President Obama’s budget received zero votes.

That’s because it’s all about being important and getting paid in tax dollars, not, you know, actually doing anything constructive.

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We reported last year on the fact that culture-enrichers seem to have a monopoly on rape in Oslo. The latest figures have come in, and the situation hasn’t changed — for the past five years, in every single case in which the perpetrator could be identified, the rapist was of non-Western origin.

And the feminists say … [chirp…chirp…chirp]

Lileks isn’t impressed by modern education.

School ends in June and starts in August — that’s just wrong. But since they’re packed in the classroom longer, that must mean more learning, right? The Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment says high school grad exams are more or less flat: Math scores are lackluster, there’s a 1 percent hike in reading, a commensurate drop in writing, and a 2 percent drop in correctly spelling the word “commensurate.”

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I’m thinking: Yeah, probably.

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Some day we will have AutoDocs and health care prices will start to come down.

That’s assuming, of course, that the government doesn’t regulate it to death.

They do that, you know.

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No doubt she reminds them of everything they’re not and can never be.

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It has been a bad week for Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment. In a high-profile trial in Chicago, confessed Pakistani-American terrorist David Headley has revealed that his handler in the army’s Inter-Services Intelligence chose a Jewish center as part of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and plotted against a Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.

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Professor Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, author of Mau Moko: The World of Maori Tattoo, described Mr Whitmill’s claims of ownership as insufferable arrogance. “It is astounding that a Pakeha tattooist who inscribes an African American’s flesh with what he considers to be a Maori design has the gall to claim that design as his intellectual property,” she said.

Be careful when you sue, for someone might sue you.

Charlie Stross, socialist, seems unaware of the connection between his politics and those of the Yellow Peril.

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Gotta love Australians.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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

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Another attempt to save socialism by making it as painless as possible.

Why not just get rid of Medicare and make people pay for their own health care. Oh, no, can’t have that….

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Step down?! STEP DOWN?! He ought to be taken out in the courtyard and shot, his genitals stuffed in his mouth, and the parts of his dismembered body distributed around Seattle as an warning to others.

Step down. Sheesh.

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Uh, guys? These are Arab countries. There are other Arab countries who are rolling in money because we’re buying their oil. Why can’t the rich Arab countries pay for the poor Arab countries? Just a thought.

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“Explain something modern/Internet based to someone who lived and died before 1900.” When faced with that prompt for a design class, Rachel Walsh, a student at Cardiff School of Art and Design, elected to describe the Amazon Kindle e-reader to Charles Dickens. “I chose to explain the Kindle to Charles Dickens because I thought it could’ve been a helpful piece of technology to have,” Walsh explained to me in an email. “He must’ve lugged a lot of heavy books around with him in his day!”

Check it out.

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Yesterday the U.S. Justice Department warned that the federal government may cancel all flights out of Texas if the state legislature approves a law aimed at preventing the Transportation Security Administration from groping airline passengers without probable cause. H.B. 1937, which was approved unanimously by the state House of Representatives and is being considered by the state Senate, applies to any government employee who, without probable cause to suspect a crime has been committed, “performs a search for the purpose of granting access to a publicly accessible building or form of transportation” and in the process “touches the anus, sexual organ, buttocks, or breast of another person including through the clothing, or touches the other person in a manner that would be offensive to a reasonable person.” Such a search would be a misdemeanor punishable by a $4,000 fine and up to a year in jail.

Works for me.

I should think that the Obamanation would love it. What better way to promote travel by rail?