The Other McCain points out that it’s the Democrats, not the Republicans, who are the ‘party of the rich’.

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Horseshit. The whole case against waterboarding (including the conceit that waterboarding is ‘torture’) is an intellectual bait-and-switch of the same type that underlies the case for ‘gay marriage’. Like Communists, degenerates have learned that if the language can be changed in their direction, the nature of the argument will change in their direction as well, and eventually they’ll win because their stupid opponents won’t have any way to express a contrary view.

Torture is a term with an established meaning, and that meaning always includes the infliction of pain; the etymology of the word makes that clear. One of the chief signs of the degeneration of modern language (and modern culture) is the inflation of such terms in service of an ideological agenda in order to erase the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate practices.

Waterboarding does not cause pain. It causes distress, certainly; that’s kinda what it’s all about — but it does not cause PAIN, and so IT IS NOT TORTURE, no matter how many hand-wringers bleat otherwise.

No, severe psychological trauma is not pain. No, making you want your mommy is not pain. No, preventing you from sleeping  more than an hour at a time is not pain (it’s ‘boot camp’). Terms have meanings, and allowing those meanings to be corrupted is the first step on the road to Orwellian doublethink and thoughtcrime.

This article once again demonstrates the essentially adolescent attitude of those who write for tReason magazine, and the soi-disant libertarians who are their fellow-travelers. Time to grow up, people. Evil men are standing by to kill us, and our families, and our civilization — and your pusillanimity endangers us all. Man up, or shut up.

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Hey, remember back in the old days when you could post a picture on Twitter and not have it ransacked by news organisations and picture agencies? Yeah, those days are gone. All these picture sharing apps are looking lovingly at the feed of images coming in and licking their lips. Whether you like it or not, one day these apps will have to monetize and there is gold in them there photos…

So there’s been a huge blow-up around the use of these images. Twitpic is being reported as claiming the copyright on your images. And entertainment news and photo group WENN has signed a deal with the photo app, ” to represent those images.” Oh really? How convenient for everyone. But what about the users?

Lesson: Put your stuff online, others will use it … whether you like it or not, whether your rights are respected or not, whether your privacy is respected or not, whether you’re paid or not, and inevitably to your detriment. Putting your information online is like putting all of your worldly possessions out in the yard and then trucking off to work. Don’t be surprised if it’s not there when you get back — or if it’s been destroyed in the meantime. Verbum sapientis sat est.

Check it out.

Tim Cavanaugh writes the obituary.

The only way railroads are useful is when the alternative is feet, either yours or a horse’s. When the alternative is a self-propelled individual vehicle, like an automobile, then rail is always the inferior choice. These ‘progressives’ have got to stop living in the past.

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At some point during the attack, the man and the cat reportedly were injured by a knife the man was holding. The man was taken to Cleveland Regional Medical Center before being transported to Houston.

They can surprise you.

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If Repblicans were doing this in, say, New York, this same NPR would be deriding them as kooks and nutt-cases, of course.

Politically, the Tucson metro area has long been more moderate than other parts of the state.

Meaning ‘more left-wing’ in NPR-speak.

The University of Arizona plays a big role. So do government workers.

Oh, ya think?

And southern Arizona was part of Mexico until 1854. So Eckerstrom says it’s more culturally integrated.

Great, let’s sell it back to the Mexicans. Perhaps we can do the same with Travis County here in Texas, the blue zit on the ass of an otherwise sensible state.

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The lesson of Watergate—it’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the cover-up—isn’t covered on China’s driving test. But perhaps it should be. In recent months the Chinese public has been shocked by multiple cases of drivers killing accident victims in hopes of evading legal responsibilities.

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The new underground locomotion tech comes from Professor Daniel Goldman of Georgia Tech and his colleagues, funded in their mechanical mole research by the US Army and National Science Foundation. The prof and his team were inspired by the sandfish lizard of the Sahara desert, which “swims” through the sand seas there.

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A controversial new scheme will allow parents in South Africa to dump unwanted infants anonymously in a ‘babe safe’ mounted on a public wall.

They call it a ‘baby safe’ because ‘garbage pail’ was already taken.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Katherine Mangu-Ward looks at endangered species.

Wolves are notoriously slow to hire lobbyists. Lichen doubly so. It’s no surprise, then, that the Endangered Species Act is a law written by humans and used for human ends. Ever since the act’s 1973 debut, supporters and opponents have accused each other of playing politics with the fates of nearly extinct plants and animals. To be fair, both sides are usually right. In Listed, conservation biologist Joe Roman recounts the uses and abuses of a well-intentioned but all-too-human law.

The difficulty of getting off the list of endangered species ranks right up there with unsubscribing from the Pottery Barn catalog.

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

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More germane to showers, we rarely admit how much of who we are is driven by our subconscious minds.  We know our dreams, which are owned and operated by our subconscious, can be incredibly creative.  But on a busy day in modern times we are bombarded with information, and our conscious mind dominates. It’s only when we have quiet time, going for a walk, getting some exercise, or taking a shower, that our conscious minds quiet down enough for our sub-conscious to be heard. And that’s why you get ideas in the shower. The other inputs to your mind are quiet, your body (which is connected to your brain) is relaxed, and the way is clear for the rest of your brain to bubble up interesting thoughts. (Chapter 1,  6 and 12 of The Myths of Innovation explores the science/history of, and advice on, how creativity works – sample chapters here (PDF)).

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Government-run health care is like entropy: You can’t win the game, you can’t break even in the game, and you can’t get out of the game.

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Strange but interesting.

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Why the appallingly (wink wink) low numbers of blacks in our special elite units? This is a topic about which I truly know more than the average person. I spent four years at Fort Bragg, home of the airborne. Many of my neighbors were Green Berets and Rangers. I also spent two years at the Norfolk Naval Base and was in close proximity to the Navy SEALs. And, prior to my military career I was a swim instructor at McBurney YMCA on 7th Avenue and 23rd Street. I had over 50 students, about ten of whom were black.

There is ONE MAJOR reason why blacks are so dramatically underrepresented in our elite units. They cannot swim, and when they do, about 98 percent of them do so with extreme difficulty. There is no way of getting around passing the very rigorous swim test to be a Green Beret or SEAL. The results cannot be faked or dumbed down. Either you can do it or you can’t. And blacks, due to their high bone density and lack of body fat (well, at least the type that makes you float), lack the buoyancy to swim well, and particularly to swim under strenuous circumstances. And the very, very few that can pass the test, are more often than not lighter skin blacks with plenty of white-boy-stay-afloat chromosomes in their gene (swimming) pool. I saw it first hand in getting my students to relax in the water. All my black students, including the females, when let loose and allowed to float in the water, sank like Clark Cable’s submarine in “Run Silent, Run Deep.” The very body which makes blacks world class sprinters and superior basketball and football stars, works against them in the water. End of story. Unless the PC Police can accuse the water and ocean of being racist.

The Other McCain is on the case.

You’ll excuse my factual description of the event, but I haven’t seen so many dogs in one place since the AKC grand championship show.

Paris, Lindsay, and Britney were apparently otherwise occupied.

You aren’t allowed to disagree with feminists, you aren’t allowed to criticize feminists and, most of all, you aren’t allowed to make fun of feminists. It’s time people wake up and smell the totalitarianism.

He does these things so that you don’t have to.

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But what about all those mosques that Christian mobs set fire to? Oh … wait … there aren’t any.

“My son attends this church. How can we ever feel safe?” said Nashaat Boshra, who stood crying in front of Saint Mary’s on Sunday. “This is religious strife facilitated by the army and police. Let’s just face the truth.”

The sectarian conflict on Saturday was Egypt’s worst since 13 people died in violence on March 9 sparked by a church burning and throws down a new challenge for generals ruling the country since the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak.

The worst fighting since … two whole months ago!

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

Read it.

Or many of them, anyway.

George Will sees through the bullshit.

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It won’t happen. Two words: ‘Building code’. Like most tax laws, the building code in New York City is the size of a set of encyclopedias and enshrines various political favors that politicians have given various unions and other special interests for nigh unto two hundred years. Like the Internal Revenue Code or immigration law, it has also spawned a specialist slither of lawyers who specialize in gaming the system–for a price.

I do admire their charming optimism, though. Kids can be so cute.

Sven Birkerts in praise of idleness.

It is a confusing concept, though, and to find that pure and valid strain, it would help to say what it is not. Idleness is not inertness, for example. Inertness is immobile, inattentive, somehow lacking potential. Neither is idleness quite laziness, for it does not convey disinclination. It is not torpor, or acedia—the so-called Demon of Noontide—nor is it any form of passive resistance, for these require an engagement of the will, and idleness is manifestly not about that. Gandhi was not promulgating idleness, nor was Bartleby the scrivener exhibiting it when he owned that he would “prefer not to.” Nor are we talking about the purged consciousness that Zen would aspire to, or any spiritually influenced condition: idleness is not prayer, meditation, or contemplation, though it may carry tonal shadings of some of these states.

Idleness is a wait-state,  the phase of being that martial artists call the no-mind: engaged but not acting, situational awareness waiting for a trigger.

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The revisionist view is that deposit insurance is a case of the government concocting a solution to a problem that was created by government in the first place. That is, the U.S. banking system was unstable due to regulations that promoted small, local banks and inhibited the creation of diversified nationwide banks. Had banks been allowed to branch across state lines or had national bank holding companies been allowed to grow naturally, then (according to this argument) we would have seen few bank failures, even in the 1930’s. Hence, there would be no need for deposit insurance.

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The process behind the innovative new brick is known as microbial-induced calcite precipitation, or MICP, and utilizes microbes on sand to “glue” the grains together using a chain of chemical reactions. And the end product is fairly strong – according to Metropolis Mag, it resembles sandstone but can be as strong as fired-clay brick or even marble depending on how it is made.

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“Without a college degree, hard-pressed for jobs,” is the headline on an NPR story, right now topping the “most popular list” on the NPR site. Funny how it doesn’t mention Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Enterprise Rent-a-Car’s Jack Taylor, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Dell computer’s Michael Dell, movie and music producer David Geffen, and Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson. None of them are college graduates, and they’re all doing okay.

I suspect that ‘working for somebody else’ is a foundational concept among those of the Crust, of which NPR employees would appear to be archetypes.

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The background (which I didn’t know until fairly recently), is that any investment where the return does not depend on the investor’s active, day-to-day involvement is considered a security. And securities, no matter how small, are either regulated by the SEC or state securities departments. There are no de minimis exceptions; shares in a lemonade stand would require registration, which I’m told costs $50,000-$100,000 or more (federal) or $20,000-$50,000 (state), mostly legal fees. For VC-free startups based on people doing things that they care about, these costs are prohibitive.

As usual, under the guise of protecting us against nefarious consequences, government involvement in daily life increases the hassle of doing anything productive to the point where only those willing and able to commit large amounts of resources to an enterprise are in a position to do so. (Or you could get a government grant….)

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We have the technology.

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To be an American today is to constantly experience this kind of cognitive dissonance. The world we read about in magazines and newspapers and see on our televisions and movie screens is a multiracial paradise complete with superintelligent black scientists leading us to a bright future, if only they can avoid the never ending threat of violent white racism. The world we actually live in is a largely segregated one where almost every white person, liberal or conservative, would rather commute hours to work and pay exorbitant gasoline prices rather than have to live among blacks.

It’s a world where largely white sports fans pay thousands of dollars for season tickets to cheer for largely black athletes, but take care not to send their children to an integrated school. It’s a world where standards are lowered so unqualified blacks can attend elite colleges and learn about “white privilege.” It’s a world where “flash mobs” of blacks randomly assault whites in fast food restaurants and mass transit systems, but law enforcement receives training from the Southern Poverty Law Center on how to combat white racism. Most of all, it’s a world where no one, black or white, wants to admit the truth of Black Run America – that we are a nation where nearly every institution is entirely devoted to protecting and promoting the interests of Black people above all others.

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According to a new report, 47 percent of Detroiters are  ”functionally illiterate.” The alarming new statistics were released by the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund on Wednesday.

But I’ll bet they’ve got lost of diversity and self-esteem.

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These curved, solar-panel-covered seats rotate on an axis to keep them facing the sun, generating additional energy from the rocking motion created when people climb inside. All that harvested electricity can be used to recharge gadgets plugged into the three USB ports and to illuminate a light strip on the inside of the loop.

Daniel Pipes speaks sense.

Give up on the pretence that the two governments are allies and treat Pakistan – with its many madrassahs, its Islamist military leadership, and rogue intelligence service – as a danger zone. Adopt a policy of containment vis-à-vis the Islamism coming out of it, rewarding cooperation and punishing hostile acts. This approach permits Washington flexibly to collaborate or confront as circumstances warrant and needs change.

And stop giving them money except for services rendered in helping what’s going on in Afghanistan.

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As you can see, it’s not technically an alarm clock, but it does have an alarm of sorts: four tunable strings that are plucked using a spinning guitar pick.

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Soaps are “certainly not expensive by other entertainment gauges,” says former producer Michael Laibson, a leader of the creative teams at “All My Children” and “Guiding Light.” But “they don’t pay the people [on reality TV] the same kinds of wages. The acting, the above-the-line costs [for creative talent] are much higher on soaps. Generally, on a soap there are about 30 actors that are under contract so they have a guaranteed number of performances per week and a guaranteed salary per performance.”

Union super-minimum wages lead directly to high unemployment. AFTRA requires each of the main performers to be paid at least $913 a day, but stars get much more.

Not really. The soap industry is highly skilled, and “Days of Our Lives” is a more polished product than “The Biggest Loser.” Soaps are more like airlines. The value of their product has dwindled rapidly, but unions don’t provide flexibility for trimming costs to keep up. Since soaps aren’t a separate industry, they can’t use bankruptcy as a wedge to reopen contracts and make cuts. An AFTRA source who didn’t want to be identified says, “We’re certainly mindful of the challenges the industry faces,” although not mindful enough to back down on their main goal: “We want to increase pay and benefits for our members.”

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After ten years of forbearance—and about $20 billion of aid—it’s time for Washington to stop accepting Islamabad’s excuses. Declaring Pakistan a terrorist state may be a step too far, but America can step up its demands for Pakistan to stop sitting on its hands and take immediate action against the infamous Haqqani Network, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers in Eastern Afghanistan. It should also demand the capture of al Zawahiri and the Taliban’s Mullah Omar. The alternative: stepped up drone attacks and Special Forces operations on Pakistani territory, and a green light for India to take unilateral action of its own against the perpetrators of the 2008 Mumbai massacre.

Read it. And watch the video.

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Remember: Information in your possession takes a warrant under the 4th Amendment. Information in the possession of a third party — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, the phone company, a cloud-storage backup service like Carbonite or Dropbox — doesn’t come under the 4th Amendment and only takes a subpoena.

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There are some good thoughts here, but unfortunately they’re served on a bed of crap.

Deliberate practice requires careful reflection on what worked and what didn’t work. A budding concert pianist may practice a particularly troublesome passage listening for places where his fingers do not flow smoothly. A chess student may spend hours analyzing one move of a world-championship chess match trying to see what the grandmasters saw. This kind of practice demands time for reflection and intense concentration, so intense that it is difficult to sustain for longer than 3 hours per day.

And applies only to very narrow, very advanced endeavors, not to the sort of comprehensive synoptic study that constitutes the bulk of education outside of a Ph.D. program (or equivalent).

In the grade-school years, deliberate practice is already hard to find. My strongest memory from fifth-grade mathematics is pages and pages of tedious three-digit-by-three-digit multiplication problems. Day after day! It is, alas, the kind of rote practice that I have done for chess: simply playing lots of games.

And, unless you’re a child prodigy, it’s out of place. Three-digit multiplication problems may be tedious, but they certainly impart an ability to do multiplication problems quickly and easily.

In college as in grade school, where is the time for deliberate practice?

Perhaps during the times when lesser lights are doing keggers and mixers. Most college students have sufficient free time to do a deep dive into any particular subject found particularly attractive. They just don’t do it. That’s not the fault of the education system as a system, except insofar as it fails to select for motivation in addition to intelligence.

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Virgin Galactic says it has achieved another glide-test milestone in its effort to carry tourists into space.The company said Wednesday its commercial vehicle dubbed SpaceShipTwo successfully performed a key maneuver in which its twin tail booms were rotated upward at a right angle to the fuselage before safely landing

We have the technology.

The Other McCain has a fine rant today.

One of the most pernicious ideas of recent decades – originating in the 1960s “Generation Gap,” but getting worse all the time — is the belief that youth per se has some distinct political value, a belief which in turn involves a willingness to accept pop-culture hipness as actual knowledge.

What accounts for this attitude? I would argue that it is actually rooted in Baby Boom nostalgia. The ’60s generation remembers when the pronouncements of “youth leaders” like Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman and Mark Rudd were taken very seriously and so, now ensconced in executive positions, they keep looking for the next generation of “youth leaders.”

You want to slap them and say, “Hey, wake up: The Sixties sucked!”

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Columbia University, the University of Maryland and the Smithsonian Institution have pooled their expertise to create the world’s first plant identification mobile app using visual search—Leafsnap. This electronic field guide allows users to identify tree species simply by taking a photograph of the tree’s leaves. In addition to the species name, Leafsnap provides  high-resolution photographs and information about the tree’s flowers, fruit, seeds and bark—giving the user a comprehensive understanding of the species.

Boy Scouts of the world, rejoice.

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I blame Cthulhu.

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International law is grounded in the practice of states, and the practice of some states matters more than others.  One might think that wicked or unjust or what have you, but if one wants international law to be something more than law professor fantasies, it has to be grounded in how states behave.  International law can get a little bit ahead of where states want to go, but not very far ahead.  It is not just the United States that matters, quite true.  I sorrow to say it, but it is true that China’s views of human rights law and internal interference matter a great deal.

I wish it were otherwise, but China’s views matter a great deal more than Ireland’s or Germany’s or many other countries, in part because countries like Germany long ago stopped pulling their weight in global security, where the rubber meets the road.  “Justice, American Style,” Der Spiegel’s title sneers.  Well, what shall it be: “Free riders, German-style”? The sneers can go both ways, and they can go back and forth forever; Der Spiegel would have been well-advised to skip the sneers and the condescension and the otherworldliness that permeates its alternative-universe theory of law.

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An American firm has developed a cunning, beercan-sized robot which can be shot out of a gun, stick to the side of a ship magnetically, and then climb up the ship’s side in the fashion of a pirate with a knife or cutlass between his teeth.

William Hague and Margaret Beckett are either liars or idiots. Either eventuality would disturb me, since Hague is Foreign Secretary and Beckett was Foreign Secretary.

The system currently in place is called ‘first past the post’ which means that whoever gets the most votes in a parliamentary election wins. Example: Candidate A gets 40% of the vote, candidate B gets 30% of the vote, and candidate C gets 30% of the vote, candidate A wins even though 60% of the voters voted for somebody else. This is the system that Hague and Beckett praise as being ‘equal votes’. I suspect that their position is informed more by vested interest than by any interest in either fairness or democracy.

The system being proposed is often called the ‘Australian system’ because they are the chief proponents of it; it is also often called the ‘automatic runoff’ system. Each voter marks his ballot in order of preference, first choice and second choice and third choice etc. When the votes are counted, if no candidate gets a majority, then the candidate who got the least votes gets dropped and the ballots that went for him as first choice get redistributed based on their second choice. If again no candidate gets a majority, then again the lowest candidate gets dropped and his ballots get redistributed. And so on until somebody gets a majority; by the time you get to two candidates, a majority for one of them is inevitable. (Hence the characterization ‘automatic runoff’.) In any event, the winner of the election is guaranteed to have a majority behind him. This is the system that Hague and Beckett call ‘unfair’ and ‘some votes are counted more than others’. (The latter, of course, is pure bullshit – they’re counted more than once only in a mechanical sense.)

Any objective consideration of the two processes reveals that the latter is actually the fairer and more democratic system. It is a measure of the degeneration of the modern Conservative party in Britain that two senior government officials indulge in such fairy tales. They might as well change their party name to ‘Democrats’ and be done with it.

UPDATE: I rarely agree with Charlie Stross in anything, but his take on this issue is spot on.

Read it.

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

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

Read it.

This site contains what we believe is the most accurate frequency data of English. It contains word frequency lists of the top 60,000 words (lemmas) in English, collocates lists (looking at nearby words to see word meaning and use), and n-grams (the frequency of all two and three-word sequences in the corpora).

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

Steve Sailer smells a rat, and says what we all ought to be thinking.

It turns out that Osama was living in a huge compound built in 2005 that is only a few hundred meters from the Pakistan Military Academy.

Pakistan had to know. This location can’t possibly be a coincidence. Pakistani government insiders put him right in their pocket so they could protect him. They hugged him to their bosom.

They’ve been scamming us for billions of dollars for years pretending to help us chase Osama Bin Laden while they’ve been sheltering him in their equivalent of West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs rolled into one. He was an official guest of the Deep State of Pakistan. Maybe the elected leaders didn’t know, or didn’t want to know because they might end up as dead as Benazir Bhutto.