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Behavior meriting the Darwin Award usually occurs in isolated incidents. But in The Australian we learn of an entire organized movement that deserves the Darwin Award: “planking,” described as “the internet-driven phenomenon whereby people lie plank-like in unusual locations and take photos of themselves, often posting them on social media websites.” In the last few days in Australia, one 20-year-old man fell to his death from a seventh-floor balcony railing where he was “planking,” and another 20-year-old man is in a coma after falling from a moving car on which he was “planking.”

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Mubarak stepped down from power voluntarily. Would he have done so had he known that the new regime would put him on trial for the acts he took as president to preserve his rule? Of course not, he would have fought to the end. All leaders of Muslim countries have corrupt deals for personal gain and use force against people who threaten their regime. Putting on trial a former leader who voluntarily gave up his power assures that no Muslim leader in the future will ever voluntarily give up his power. Power will never change hands except when the former power possessor’s cold dead hands are pried from it.

Obviously Khaddafi learned from Mubarrak’s mistake. Of course, for the ideological, present revenge is important, future progress not so much.

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We have the technology.

More here.

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White people in the United States now feel more discriminated against than black people, according to a new study by professors at Harvard Business School and Tufts university.

Gee, I wonder why?

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I can. NPR can’t. They’d vote for him.

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Everybody loves comic books.

Everybody loves dinosaurs.

What’s not to like?

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But exactly what an English major makes in a lifetime has never been clear, and some defenders of the humanities have said that their students are endowed with “critical thinking” and other skills that could enable them to catch up to other students in earnings.

Turns out, on average, they were wrong.

What? You mean to say that Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t a Communications major?

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Because, of course, every flag means what it means to some chick writing for the Guardian.

If you are gay and proud, Afghanistan is quite likely the last place on earth to show it publicly. How, then, are we supposed to make sense of the recent very conspicuous appearance of the rainbow-coloured gay pride symbols all over the streets of Kabul and other urban centres?

Well, perhaps because it’s not inevitable that a rainbow flag means ‘gay pride’?

Note that you didn’t hear a lot of sniggering about the Ukrainian ‘Orange Revolution’ being a bunch of Protestants — because, you know, they’re Europeans and not a Bunch of Ignorant Wogs.

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What they can’t say, because it wouldn’t be Politically Correct, is that this was a targeted ‘mini-riot’ by a black street gang, even though that’s obvious from the films.

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

Read it. And watch the video.

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That’s what unrestricted immigration does for you — all the benefits of South Chicago.

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Lakeysha Beard, 39, was charged with disorderly conduct after she wouldn’t stop talking on the 16-hour trip from Oakland, California, to Salem, Oregon. The train was stopped short of its destination.

To the extent that there is residual anti-black racism in America, incidents like this exacerbate it.

Beard told Portland’s KATU News that she felt “disrespected” by the incident.

Good.

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Researchers examined how the Mundurucu think about lines, points and angles, comparing the results with equivalent tests on French and US schoolchildren.

The Mundurucu showed comparable understanding, and even outperformed the students on tasks that asked about forms on spherical surfaces.

Arithmetic, not so much — see Congress.

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Sex selection of foetuses in India has led to 7.1 million fewer girls than boys up to age six, a gender gap that has widened by more than a million in a decade, according to a study published in The Lancet.

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A blog devoted to food mentioned in George R.R. Martin’s books from Song of Ice and Fire.

I am not making this up. I’m sure there’s one about Tolkien-oriented food, too.

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Well, that’s what evolution is all about: Change and trim, change and trim.

Freeberg does a fine rant.

My son and I rode the light rail downtown, back in ‘09, and ran into a real live communist. He was all excited about attending his commie demonstration in downtown San Francisco, all about how we can’t take any more oppression from The Man & all, with a special keynote speaker Michael Moore! Yay! The election had only just happened, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing…the election had gone just the way Moore wanted, had it not? The hope, the change, whatever happened to that?

It was like speaking Latin to a dog. When you’re a revolutionary, history always began yesterday morning. So, yeah. There are people out there who think of Barack Obama as a symbol of all the ugliest right-wing shibboleths — blood for oil, corporate greed, keeping grass illegal, blah blah blah. And we need to get rid of Obama so we can bring the government back to The People…but they’re not Tea Party people, they’re high-drama lefties who don’t really care who’s running the show at any given time, that guy needs to go so we can Take Our Country Back. Perfect bliss is constantly one revolution away. The entire life being lived out on a turning point; the inevitable straight-away is something that simply doesn’t fit into their comprehension.

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A shadowy man suspected of fighting against US soldiers in Iraq has sparked a far-flung terror probe after entering New York Harbor as a stowaway aboard a freighter and taking up residence in a fenced-off Port Authority warehouse, The Post has learned.Asem Ellbahnsany Haroon, 26, managed to easily infiltrate Port Newark — where there are just the kind of oil refineries that Osama bin Laden talked about blowing up as part of a global-chaos plot in papers found in his Pakistan hideout.

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

Watch it.

Reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Kevin Williamson, who is deputy managing editor of National Review and author of a new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism, to discuss the meaning of socialism in history and the current moment.

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Said to be the strongest material ever measured, an improvement upon and a replacement for silicon and the most conductive material known to man, its properties have sent the science world – and subsequently the media – into a spin.

Well, yeah.

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Lesson: Bad taste pays when correctly monetized.

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Historical recordings from the Library of Congress.

Freeberg has more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.

A factoid is a questionable or spurious—unverified, incorrect, or fabricated—statement presented as a fact, but with no veracity. The word can also be used to describe a particularly insignificant or novel fact, in the absence of much relevant context. The word is defined by the Compact Oxford English Dictionary as “an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact”.

Factoid was coined by Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe. Mailer described a factoid as “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper”, and created the word by combining the word fact and the ending -oid to mean “similar but not the same”. The Washington Times described Mailer’s new word as referring to “something that looks like a fact, could be a fact, but in fact is not a fact”.

In contrast with the factoid, the fektoid is not only true, but easily proven so.It succeeds indisputably as it stands on its own; but as the foundation for an argument to be constructed on top of it, it fails glamorously.

The correct response to the appearance of a fektoid is: ‘Yeah. So?’

Megan McArdle understands the dialectic.

There were, for example, a lot of complaints about the horseless carriage.  Busy professionals like doctors pointed out that if they bought such a contraption, they would no longer be able to wrap the reins around the buggy whip and take a nap while the horse drove home.  Others pointed to the very low reliability of motor cars, compared to horses, their inferior capabilities on dirt roads, and the difficulty of finding gasoline in the countryside.  People lamented the inability to bond with their cars the way they did with their “team”, and the fact that the motor car would blindly drive you into danger where the horses would have shied away.

All of these things were true. None of them mattered.  Automobiles were faster than horses, and didn’t need to be fed when not in use.  As they became more popular, they made horses a less and less viable means of transportation: drinking troughs disappeared, livery stables and feed stores shut down, hitching posts were not installed.

Printing and distributing books is a large industry with significant economies of scale.  If too few people buy print books, the cost of the remaining books will start to rise.  Eventually, more and more applications will switch to the winning medium, even if individuals miss being able to flip through books. There will be specialty applications, but they will be very expensive.

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The Oregon man, Rob Summers, was paralyzed below the chest in 2006, after getting hit by a speeding car. This week, however, doctors announced that Summers can now stand up on his own and remain standing for up to four minutes. With the help of a special harness, he can even take steps on a treadmill and can move his lower extremities for the first time in years.

We have the technology.

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But notice how the article, by Elisha Anderson in the Detroit Free Press, is written. It tells us that Thomas wrote a “threatening message” and was charged with “ethnic intimidation.” It doesn’t say that he is a black person who wrote a note intended to sound as if it was written by a white person who was threatening to kill black people. The actual nature of Thomas’s offense is never stated in the article. We are told that he has committed “ethnic intimidation,” not that he has committed a fraud aimed at getting whites in trouble for a non-existent racist threat against blacks.

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I guess having roads is contrary to shari’ah.

ISLAM: Retarding the march of civilization for 1400 years … and counting.

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Find extraterrestrial intelligence? I’m sure there’s an app for that.

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Just another fine day in the Obamanation.

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Oh, like they have a choice.

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Unfortunately, U.S. view of Muslims still not negative enough.

Megan McArdle is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

It’s a romantic figure: the teacher who spends thirty or forty or sixty years patiently shepherding children through the tricky process of learning to read, or speak French, or do long division.  The whole public school system is set up to reinforce this ideal.  The pay system rewards seniority, the tenure system protects it, and the pension system exacerbates all of this….

Because teachers are the secular equivalent of nuns, and everybody expects nuns to work like dogs all their lives for chicken feed.

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If there is one overwhelming investment trend among the American rich, it is capital flight.

Rather than investing in the U.S., they are putting more and more of their money abroad.

Gee, I wonder why?

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Hospital emergency rooms, particularly those serving the urban poor, are closing at an alarming rate even as emergency visits are rising, according to a report published on Tuesday.

Gee, maybe those two things are connected.

Emergency departments were most likely to have closed if they served large numbers of the poor, were at commercially operated hospitals, were in hospitals with skimpy profit margins or operated in highly competitive markets, the researchers found.

In other words, they can’t afford to provide free health care to people who can’t afford to pay. Duh.

The aim of the analysis was to figure out what characteristics make a hospital emergency department likely to close, Dr. Hsia said. Rural hospitals were excluded because some are designated “critical access hospitals” and operate under federal mandate.

Hint: The laws of economics work even when you don’t want them to.

Emergency rooms are required by law to provide treatment regardless of ability to pay. “People will have coverage, but there’s a concern that there will be nowhere for them to go,” Dr. Schneider said.

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

This entire article is like saying ‘Studies suggest that people who get hit in the head are much more likely to experience head pain than people who don’t.’ The phrase ‘thumb-sucker’ seems barely adequate.

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Cornel West, who is the Class of 1943 university professor at Princeton, calls President Obama “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.”

Princeton ’43 must have been a sparse harvest.

The Boston Globe reports: “West also recounts personal slights by Obama — that his phone calls didn’t get returned, and that he couldn’t get a ticket with his mother and brother to the inauguration.”

As Professor West puts it: “brother Barack Obama had no sense of gratitude, no sense of loyalty, no sense of even courtesy.”

I guess West has turned into a Republican. Pity.

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Hey, whatever else you can say about the guy, at least he loves his mother.

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Modern American government has been dispensing nutritional advice for quite a while, and enough of it has been misguided, erroneous or even harmful that you’d think there’d be a lesson of humility to be learned. Instead, we get a bossier-than-ever crop of new regulators like Thomas Frieden et al.

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

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Since the fall of Mubarak, the Obamites and neocons, like global limousine liberals, have shifted the focus of their do-gooderism from Egypt to the next great liberal/neocon cause, helping overthrow Kaddafi, even as Egypt has steadily moved in exactly the direction that the Islam critics predicted. Below is a powerful and well-written article by a liberal Muslim in Canada who expresses total disillusion with the Islamic rise to power and the concomitant persecution of Christians that have resulted from the great democratic revolution.

Reality keeps reminding us that democracy is a means, not an end, and like any tool can produce undesirable results. Our leaders keep not getting the message.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

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By definition, artisan foods are ingredients and foods that are hand-crafted, created in small quantities, and tend to be high-quality products.

Almost by definition, they tend to be very pricey and affordable only by the Crust and their friends.

Jeff Jarvis isn’t afraid to ask hard questions.

The answer to this question is probably yes. But I don’t think it should be answered until we reconsider the delivery industry from the ground up, seeing what is no longer needed and what the market can provide in the digital age.

The traditional argument for a government-run postal service is a standard one for non-essential government services in general: It’s a good thing, people ought to have it, private companies won’t provide it where there’s no money to be made, so the government has to be the ‘provider of last resort’. (If anything reminds you of the ‘health care debate’, you’re not alone.) On this basis, one might deduce that government-provided postal service will be a money-losing proposition, and that’s certainly the case in the modern world. (How much of that is due to the traditional corruption and inefficiency that the government brings to anything it touches, and how much is just a reflection of market forces, is an exercise left to the reader.)

Do we still need the Postal Service’s guarantee of universal delivery? Likely yes, but it’s worth asking whether that obligation to get deliveries to remote outposts should be carried out with offices and trucks owned by the government or through subsidies to private industry. Does the Postal Service have a role to play in and identity (could it be a guarantor?) and security (our mail is protected from warrantless spying but our email so far is not). What are the principles and rights to privacy and security that should govern even private and electronic delivery? What impact does all this have on broadband policy?

Good questions all. Nobody in the government is asking them, of course, because government employees don’t have any incentive to reduce the services provided by government (and hence the number of government employees). So those of us who are paying for all this need to start asking them, and ought to be pressing our elected representatives (when they can take some time from fund-raising in order to get re-elected) to ask them as well.

Good luck with that.

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It is hard for us in America to grasp how consuming this story must be to the French. Imagine that in January 2008 Barack Obama, having won the Iowa caucuses and become the front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, had been arrested for attempting to rape a hotel maid in New York City, photographed in handcuffs, and imprisoned in Rikers Island.

Many of us would have said ‘Mission accomplished.’ and gone back to whatever we were doing.

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Lots of people sympathize with the basic argument that your private life is private, and it seems unfair to have private affairs spread across the news. And yet, if someone really is doing something egregious — or potentially harmful — is seeking to gag the press and others from making that information public only giving them cover to progress further and commit potentially heinous acts?

How many times have we read stories about people attempting to investigate possible malfeasance on the part of an organization only to be firewalled by assertions that privacy policies (and sometimes privacy laws) don’t allow any information to be released?

Steve Sailer has some fun with the culture.

Thus, evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa finds himself widely hated today for posting an item on Psychology Today asking “Why are black women rated less physically attractive than other women, but black men are rated better looking than other men?” It caused such a furor (described here) that the magazine deleted it, so only a screenshot survives. Of course, the reason the whole world got so angry with Dr. Kanazawa is because black women are rated less physically attractive than other women on average.

So, you aren’t supposed to say that. If he had said “Why are Slavic supermodels rated less physically attractive than other women?” nobody would have much cared.

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Roiling debates in state capitals across the land demonstrate a backlash against the unions. But a new book by Terry Moe argues that it’s technology, not politics, that will be their undoing. Moe is a political science professor at Stanford and has long been a leading advocate for charter schools and vouchers. Special Interest is in part a solid history of the rise of the unions not so long ago — in the 1960s and ’70s. But the book’s analysis of sweeping trends is what’s most compelling. Moe says legislative reforms like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top “are small things by comparison, and they can be blocked.” By contrast, “education technology is a tsunami that is only now beginning to swell.” Unions “can’t stop it, although they will try.”

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A clever device that is not much known in the U.S.

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And no doubt blamed the Americans.

An Egyptian princess who lived more than 3,500 years ago is the oldest known person to have had clogged arteries, dispelling the myth that heart disease is a product of modern society, a new study says.