Ryan Davidson from Law and the Multiverse does what lawyers do best.

We’ve mentioned it in comments, but some idiot was arrested and charged in Michigan last month for hanging off the side of a building in a Batman costume with a variety of concealed weapons. The cops were, to put it mildly, not amused. The stock-in-trade of the costumed hero involves trespassing, violations of weapons laws (for concealed weapons if nothing else), and disturbing the peace, if not also assault or worse. Sure, there’s plenty of crime in our streets, but at this point, it isn’t the kind of crime that we believe could not be solved by police officers if there were enough of them.

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It would be hard to imagine a more apocalyptic battle between synagogue and state than the ballot-box battle that is unfolding in San Francisco over the right of Jews (and anyone else) to circumcise their newborn males. Now the battle is spreading down the left coast to Santa Monica.

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There’s been a lot of talk about the e-G8 Conference this week, which was an attempt to bring together technology and internet leaders with government officials. The idea, apparently, was for government officials to convince the digerati that it was time for government to take a much more active role in regulating the internet. The initial reports suggest that the tech folks weren’t buying what Nicolas Sarkozy and other government officials were selling — with some putting out scathing reports about any company willing to help the government clamp down on free speech online.

If it moves, tax it. If it’s still moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it and put a government bureaucracy in charge.

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I can see a place for this in dense cities, much as for mass transit, where there’s enough of a non-motile customer base to make it viable. Don’t think it would work in the suburbs, though, especially for perishables; people with cars prefer to get stuff from their local store, where they can see the quality before they buy.

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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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Though most regions of the U.S. saw declines, the Northeast saw an increase in murders (8.3%), forcible rapes (1.4%)  and aggravated assaults (0.7%).  Why that region was affected by crime more than others isn’t clear.  Perhaps it was because of the grinding poverty found in some of the area’s cities and their high cost of living.

Perhaps it’s because they’re all run by Democrats.

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And, really, why should they? The whole point of getting taxpayer money is that you don’t ever have to pay it back.

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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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Actually, it’s Dead Kids + Media-Whore Politicians that make bad laws. Dead Kids are necessary but not sufficient. (You might include stupid narcissistic parents in the mix as a contributing factor, too.)

Just because your kid was stupid and is now dead because of it doesn’t mean you get to stick it to everybody else. Your bad genes, not ours. Just sayin’.

UPDATE: Radley Balko has a good piece on it.

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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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Case in point.

[Assmeblyman Rory Lancman (D-Queens)], who is Chair of the Assembly Subcommittee on Workplace Safety, says the bill would require hotels to provide staff with electronic alert devises that can alert hotel security in an emergency. The devices would act like a “panic” button- much like “life alert.”

Of course they would never think about requiring such an alarm to protect the safety of hotel residents — who cares what happens to tourists?

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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.

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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.

Veronique de Rugy points out how economic models are biased in favor of government spending.

All these analysts also systematically ignore the fact that GDP numbers include government spending. When the federal government pumps trillions of dollars into the economy, it looks as if GDP is growing. When government cuts spending—even cuts within the most inefficient programs—aggregate GDP shrinks.

But that’s misleading. If Washington spends $1 a year on a bureaucrat’s salary, for example, GDP numbers will register growth of exactly $1, whether or not the employee has produced any value for that money. By contrast, if a firm pays an engineer $1, that $1 only shows up in the GDP if the engineer produces $1 worth of stuff to sell. This distinction biases GDP numbers—and the policies based on them—toward ever-increasing government spending.

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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.