Read it.

And over the cliff they goooooooooooo….

Read it.

Being the last place that anyone would look.

Read it.

This would appear to be the famous ‘palm lock’ that we all know and love from classic science fiction stories.

Read it.

A boon to conspiracy theorists everywhere.

67 percent of vegetarians have dyed their hair, compared with 44 percent of people in general.

Truly, one can find anything on the Internet.

Read it.

Read it.

Intuary, a mobile app startup, recently launched its first app, called Verbally, which is designed to bring speech to those without. Verbally is an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) solution built for the more than six million people in the U.S. suffering from speech disabilities — caused by Lou Gherig’s Disease, stroke, brain injury, Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy, autism, and more. The app allows users to tap the words they wish to communicate onto the app’s keyboard, or choose from pre-prepared words or phrases, which are then in turn transmitted into audio phrases.

This is the ‘voder’ we all know and love from classic science fiction stories.

Read it.

The figures appear to refer primarily to those Americans wealthy enough to warrant notifying the Internal Revenue Service of their change of status, rather than all expatriates. A total of 499 Americans fell into this expatriate category during the first quarter of this year. The number during the first quarter in each of the previous seven years averaged 115.

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

The U.S. tax rules for U.S. citizens living overseas can be quite complex. The increase in awareness of the penalties has caused many individuals with dual citizenship to conclude that their U.S. citizenship is not worth the stress and hassle of the U.S. tax filing rules. The U.S. is almost the only country in the world that requires its citizens that live permanently in another country to continue to file tax returns in the country of citizenship. Combine the U.S. tax return filing complexities with the potentially bankrupting penalties for failing to report certain items, and many individuals conclude that their lives would improve by shedding their U.S. citizenship.

I wish I could say that I blamed them.

Read it.

One aspect of the Egyptian uprising (among the others, most ongoing) that was overpowered by the wild acclamation of social media is something that has been quietly but powerfully changing societal norms over the last decade. It is simply the inclusion, on almost every mobile phone sold, of a digital camera. When 90% of the active population can, at any time, record an event they are witness to, and transmit it to the rest of the world instantly, many rules begin to change.

And not necessarily in ways that can be anticipated. Read the whole thing.

Read it.

Scientists have designed a brain implant that restored lost memory function and strengthened recall of new information in laboratory rats — a crucial first step in the development of so-called neuroprosthetic devices to repair deficits from dementia, stroke and other brain injuries in humans.

Rats get all the good stuff….

Read it.

“Mitt Romney pledged in the last campaign that he would be a pro-life president and of course he pledges it today,” said Romney Campaign communications director Gail Gitcho. “However, this well-intentioned effort has some potentially unforeseen consequences and he does not feel he could in good conscience sign it.”

Weasel. Scratch Romney as a candidate.

Read it.

Steve Sailer gets into some strange stuff….

Read it.

Gee, they used to do that all the time in the Soviet Union. What’s the big deal? I’m sure Nikita Kruschev is squatting on the coals grinning because the Brits are busy burying themselves.

Read it.

I don’t think I’ve used a phone book in 15 years. Once they set up a way you could opt out of phone book delivery on the Internet I signed up and haven’t gotten one lately. Don’t miss it, either.

Read it.

Last week a Los Angeles County jury convicted Alan Kimble Fahey of 12 misdemeanors for building Phonehenge West, a quirky series of buildings atop utility poles sunk into his property in the Antelope Valley. The convictions—for maintaining illegal structures, unlawfully installing electrical wiring, and disobeying orders to stop construction—did not include a single real crime. And for a long time, the county’s building enforcers did not seem to think Fahey’s fanciful project was worth worrying about. Fahey says that after a series of visits and exchanges in the early 1980s, the county ignored him for 20 years before suddenly demanding that he tear it all down.

Yet another reason to avoid California.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Megan McArdle points out an inconvenient truth.

Proponents of health care reform are gnashing their teeth, while opponents grimly say “I told you so”, at the news of a study from Illinois showing that children in Medicaid/SCHIP have difficulty getting specialists to treat them….

And Illinois is a Blue State.

Obviously, this has implications for the plans to cut Medicare reimbursements.  And for the success of ObamaCare, since most of the coverage expansion will come, not from the exchanges, but from extending Medicaid.

Indeed. Unless you dragoon medical people into your coercive system, like the National Health Service in Britain or whatever they call that monstrosity of government-run health care in Canada, you can’t keep cutting the pay of health care providers and expect them to work for you. The market doesn’t work that way, and we still have the remnant of a free market in health care in the U.S.

Read it.

Google, Apple and Facebook get all the attention. But the forgettable everyday tasks of technology _ saving a file on your laptop, swiping your ATM card to get 40 bucks, scanning a gallon of milk at the checkout line _ that’s all IBM.

Read it.

Every worthwhile thing in life has a Greek name.

1. Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.

2. The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it’s still on my list.

3. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

4. If I agreed with you, we’d both be wrong.

Read it.

In 2006, serial inventor Cordani, 49, was experimenting with protective coatings to defend homes from hurricanes. At the same time, wildfires were raging in his home state of Florida. On a hunch, he took a sample of a viscous gel he’d developed and tried a few experiments.

“I stuck a Popsicle stick in it and tried to light it — it wouldn’t catch,” he recalls. “Then I sprayed it on a pine tree and tried to light the tree. I couldn’t.”

Very impressive.

FireIce is shipped and stored as a powder; it becomes a gel when mixed with water. Unlike firefighting foam, it does not contain noxious chemicals that remain in the environment after its use, Cordani says. (As if torching his hand wasn’t enough, Cordani has also eaten FireIce, to attest to how benign it is.)

Very nice.

It obviously blocks heat transmission. So when can we use it for insulation in houses and vehicles?

Read it.

Americans’ life expectancy may be 78 years, but a new report says only 69 of those years tend to be healthy ones _ and the problems can start long before people reach a doctor’s office.

The Obama administration is releasing a plan Thursday that calls for preventing disease and injury, with a greater emphasis on creating healthier homes, communities, foods, roads and workplaces.

Funny, I don’t see anything in the Constitution empowering the Federal government to make us live healthier lives. Or even to develop a plan for our doing so. Especially when we’ve got terrorists dedicated to killing Americans and destroying American property seemingly crossing the border like jaywalkers in Manhattan.

Read it.

If Oxford is the home of lost causes, California appears to be the Quonset hut of stupid ones. The latest to excite municipal legislators’ brains (in San Francisco and Santa Monica, anyway—Barstow and Fresno appear unaffected at this writing) is anti-circumcision. The author of ballot measures banning the practice in both burgs is one Matthew Hess, who has composed a comic book to further the cause. More of that momentarily.

Read it.

The Democratic Congress hasn’t adopted a budget in more than two years. This isn’t just irresponsible, it is illegal. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, has been hammering away at the Democrats’ dereliction, and things are starting to get a little hot for Harry Reid and Kent Conrad. Loyal Democrats like Dana Milbank and Tim Kaine are criticizing them for blowing off the budget, and Senate Democrats who have to fact the voters next year are reportedly getting nervous. So Harry Reid, naturally, is trying to change the subject.

Read it.

The existence of broadly or sloppily written statutes that require courts to fill in the blanks or resolve internal contradictions is hardly news. Indeed, it’s the ordinary business of statutory interpretation. But a Supreme Court decision last week — more precisely, a dissenting opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia — shone a spotlight on a more troubling subset of the problem: criminal laws that leave it up to judges to define the crime. It’s hard to imagine a more activist judicial endeavor, but it’s one with which Congress seems surprisingly comfortable.

Odd that Times columnist Linda Greenhouse should complain about this, since most of these flaws are the result of legislative activity by liberals whom she otherwise unflaggingly supports. The Supreme Court case she cites has Justice Kennedy sounding like a butthead and Justice Scalia sounding like a person of good common sense, which strikes me as about right; if she’s siding with Scalia (as it would appear) in calling Congressional laws dysfunctional, it would be the first time in her life she ever got closer to Scalia than a ten-foot pole.

And, of course, the ‘judicial activism’ that she is discussing is not the same thing as the ‘judicial activism’ of which critics of such activism speak: Roe v. Wade, for example, the poster child for ‘judicial activism’, doesn’t involve an unclear law but an imaginary Constitutional right that 5 Justices pulled straight out of their asses. So this would appear to be another attempt to muddy the waters with respect to an issue that liberals know would make them appear stupid if those waters were clear.

Read it.

More than a century ago, it was a fairly common practice for up-and-coming cities to build underground tunnels and shops.

Read it.

The names of the “Asian” defendants are: Ahdel Ali, Mubarek Ali, Mohammed Ali Sultan, Tanveer Ahmed, Mahroof Khan, Noshad Hussain, Mohammed Islam Choudhrey, Mohammed Younis, and Abdul Rouf.

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

Read it.

Hm. Wonder if this has anything to do with Hugh Hefner’s interrupted nuptials.

Coincidence? I think not….

Read it.

Over the past five years, New York State has awarded more than $7.4 billion in contracts to clients of law firms that employ state legislators, according to a review of court filings and other records.

The surprise here is that the New York Times bothered to mention it, since it’s universal knowledge and since the overwhelming majority of corrupt legislators are Democrats, beloved of the New York Times.

This may also be marked down as further evidence that lawyers ought to be disabled from serving as legislators. The classic argument for preferring lawyers as legislators is that it promotes well-formed laws, but recent history shows that, on the contrary, having lawyers as legislators tends to facilitate overly complex and virtually opaque laws, making more work for … wait for it … lawyers.

Read it.

Students with any kind of criminal history should be rigidly separated from normal children for schooling purposes.

This is yet another indicator that not only is our educational system broke, but it’s a positive agent of evil.

Not that anybody will pay attention, of course, until we wind up like Zimbabwe….

The Other McCain sounds the alarm.

This news is perhaps not shocking to regular readers of the New York Times‘ token “conservative” columnist, but if we ever needed smoking-gun proof, his column today is like RINO fingerprints covered with country-club DNA….

…

You can read the whole thing, which I think you will agree constitutes conclusive proof of the utter uselessness of David Brooks.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

“Me too” is not a winning platform. It never has been and never will be, and all of Brooks’s wishfulness will not convert his policy preferences into an effective politics.

And we really need a serious purge of the Republican Party or this nonsense will condemn us to ever-increasing statism until we wind up like Putin’s Russia.

Read it.

Look for … the Union label ….

Read it.

What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening, as heavyweight US solar physicists announce that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the Earth – far from facing a global warming problem – is actually headed into a mini Ice Age.

How about that Global Warming? We can all keep warm by laughing at AlGore.

Read it.

Now, a company called Avita Medical is taking wound and burn treatment to a whole new level with a new technology called ReCell. ReCell allows a doctor to take a small sample of healthy skin and cover a much larger area that has been injured. What’s really cool about this technology is that it’s a spray! That’s right, you lose a few layers of skin and doctors can now spray some back on! And from some of the before and after pictures seen below, ReCell shows promise as a breakthrough in treating skin injuries.

Read it.

The New York Times has a great article today on changing attitudes towards CS, driven in part by movies like “The Social Network.” Apart from the movie’s (glossy and inaccurate) depiction of what it’s like to be a hacker, there’s something else going on here: the fact that CS students can jump in and apply their knowledge to build great things. At Harvard, countless undergrads taking the introductory CS50 class are producing games, websites, and iPhone apps — some of which are good enough to turn into commercial products. I don’t know of any other field where this is possible after taking just a single semester’s worth of courses.

Read it.

Over at EconLong, Arnold Kling has a quick comment on the new version of my federal pay paper with Jason Richwine, arguing that our analysis of salaries, benefits, and job security isn’t really necessary: “All you need to look at are the low quit rates and the high ratio of applicants to openings.” If nobody quits federal jobs and everybody wants to have them, then that’s the market telling you that these are pretty sweet positions to hold.

Read it.

The RPG is a mechanical rather than chemical approach to portable energy storage. Its energy capacity is potentially ten times greater than a typical battery, company representatives wrote in an email exchange with TechCrunch. That depends on the kind of fuel it uses— the invention is essentially a very tiny, highly efficient engine.

This looks very interesting.

Read it.

Currently there are about 246 drugs that are in short supply, a record high. These shortages are not just a result of accident, error or unusual circumstance, the number of drugs in short supply has risen steadily since 2006. The shortages arise from a combination of systematic factors, among them the policies of the FDA. The FDA has inadvertently caused drugs long-used in the United States to be withdrawn from the market and it’s “Good Manufacturing Practice” rules have gummed up the drug production process and raised costs.

Your tax dollars at work. These are the people in whose hands Obama wants to put ALL of our health care.

Steve Sailer pulls no punches.

One reason colleges can pull the wool over the public’s eyes on this is that very few people think in systems terms about how this works. It’s hard to think about the effect of more than one college doing this at a time. If Rice was the only college in the country to have a quota, then, sure, it could fill its quota with black applicants who are “fairly indistinguishable” from the white norm.

But, funny thing is, Harvard also has a quota, so all those black applicants are going to Harvard instead of Rice. And the black students who are just below the Harvard-bound are going to Stanford and MIT on quotas instead of Rice. So, Rice takes the blacks who would be going to Texas A&M if nobody had a quota, and Texas A&M takes …
The whole system winds up pretty accurately reproducing at each college the one standard deviation gap seen in the whole population. But that’s really hard for most people to grasp.

The myth that colleges have a merit-based admissions process is one of the most persistent in American political folklore. When you get down to it, saying that colleges ought to admit the best-qualified student that are going to do well is like saying that a restaurant should only serve gourmands who will most appreciate the meal or that a movie theater should only admit trained theater students who will most understand the cinematic nuances of the films being shown.

Of course, in a world where there are more applicants than places, a college needs to have selection criteria. How about having an auction? Think of how much Harvard would pull in a year if students had to bid for a place; it’s endowment would soon be the size of the national debt, and it could still flunk the kid out freshman year if he weren’t qualified for work at that level. Differentiating service by price is what a free market is all about; that’s the American way. (Want to tax the rich? Make them bid against each other to get their kids into Yale or Stanford or MIT.)

Of course, many of these application essays are written by professional essay writers or the like, so I guess it all evens out in the long run.

That’s why British Universities, and British public schools, at least before the rot set it, used to have entrance examinations that one would sit for, like the SATs. if colleges truly cared about the quality of their students, they would require that essays be done in a limited amount of time under the eyes of proctors. Otherwise it’s just a gauge of how well the kid (and his family) can game the system.

Anyway, the message from Rice U. is: If you’ve got it, play the Race Card. Over and over again. Be as authentically nonwhite as you can. (We can tell!) You’ve got to feel deep down that you deserve this quota spot.

One commenter once noted that Dreams from My Father sounds like the President’s monstrously enlarged Diversity Essay.

I can’t improve on that for snark so I won’t even try. Steve’s a professional, after all.

For getting into college, black is best, and the one drop rule applies to who gets called black, so anybody who credibly claims to be part black will be treated as black for quota / bragging rights purposes.

And that’s the bottom line.

Read it.

Homa Dashtaki was eager to demonstrate that her yogurt was safe and healthful, but complying with California regulations turned out to be not so easy. In fact, authorities told her that she would face possible prosecution unless she established a “Grade A dairy facility” employing processes more commonly found in factories. A highlight: she’d have to install a pasteurizer even though she made her yogurt from milk that was already pasteurized. What’s more, California law makes it illegal to pasteurize milk twice, so there went any hope of continuing her straightforward way of obtaining milk, namely bringing it home from a fancy grocery store.

One of the chief means that nanny states use to destroy businesses too small to employ lobbyists in favor of businesses big enough to employ lobbyists is to require processes and equipment that only big businesses can afford. The Federal government rings the changes on this by requiring levels of benefits and paperwork base-touching that only big businesses can afford. Your tax dollars at work, although not for you.

Although a small artisan cheese sector struggles to get by, the California dairy market generally is dominated by mass-market producers selling blandly standardized wares. And you can see how that winds up happening.

Come to Texas, which is creating jobs (not destroying them, as California persists in doing). A lot of people are.

Read it.

Modern photography using Victorian tools and techniques. At last it is revealed why most upper-class people in the 19th century looked dimwitted.

Pretty awesome.

Read it.

Archeologists in Croatia have identified what they believe is the world’s only triple-barrel cannon inspired by the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci.

The bronze cannon, from the late 15th century, bears a striking resemblance to sketches drawn by the Renaissance inventor, notably in his Codex Atlanticus – the largest collection of his drawings and writing.

Read it.

It’s not surprising (in this degenerate modern world where ‘racist’ and ‘fascist’ mean ‘something that I don’t like’) to see such hoaxes being embraced by the Usual Suspects, a coalition of the simple-minded and their tendentious masters. After all, it fits their political narrative like a glove; one of those ‘Of course it’s true! It has to be true!’ moments.

Read it.

Not a bad record for a country that has no actual reason to exist.

Don’t forget to send a card. I’m sure it would be appreciated.

Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership, since party members were more ready to go to any extreme for any reason whatever. These parties were not formed to enjoy the benefits of established laws, but to acquire power by overthrowing the existing regime; and the members of these parties felt confidence in each other not because of any fellowship in a religious communion, but because they were partners in crime. If an opponent made a reasonable speech, the party in power, so far from giving it a generous reception, took every precaution to see that it had no practical effect.

— Peloponnesian War 3:82.

There is nothing new under the sun….

Read it.

‘Precious Reynolds’? *sigh* On the other hand, perhaps it’s that name that helped to make her strong.

Read it.

Conservative and libertarian critics of immigration like to cite Milton Friedman’s observation that “[y]ou cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state,” which co-blogger Ken Anderson recently endorsed. The fear is that, given relatively open borders, immigrants from poor countries will flock to wealthy ones and undermine their economies by consuming huge amounts of welfare benefits.

This would seem fairly obvious.

British newspapers, for example, are rife with stories about Muslim terrorists and purveyors of terrorism who live off of the British welfare state, a singularly appalling situation.

I suspect that if one were to look at the incidence of, say, illegal Latino immigrants in the U.S. getting welfare benefits, either illicitly or due to White Liberal Guilt in such places as the Left Coast and the Other Left Coast, the situation in the U.S. would be equally disturbing.

I am a great admirer of Friedman and his scholarship. But he was not an expert on immigration, and, as far as I can tell, he never systematically studied the evidence on the impact of immigration on political support for the welfare state. That evidence overwhelmingly shows that ethnic heterogeneity greatly reduces support for welfare state spending because voters are less willing to support welfare programs if they believe that a large percentage of the money is going to members of a different racial or ethnic group.

Perhaps so, but that reluctance hasn’t expressed itself politically so far — at least not very effectively. The situation may change in the future, but we pessimists aren’t going to be holding our breath waiting for it.

This feedback effect creates a difficult dilemma for liberals and leftists who support immigration but also want to expand the welfare state. Paul Krugman calls the welfare-immigration tradeoff an “agonizing issue” for liberal Democrats. But for libertarians and other supporters of economic liberty, immigration is a win-win game. It is both an important exercise of economic freedom in its own right, and has the secondary effect of constraining the welfare state.

However much that may be true in the long run, in the short term it just degrades the quality of life for everybody, and those of us who see the glass as half-full (and emptying rapidly) are unwilling to assume the existence of some guarantee that the process will bottom out before we are all in the poorhouse.

One of the problems with libertarianism as a practical political program is its Polyannaish insistence that ‘everything will work out in the end’, when all that bystanders can actually see are things descending rapidly into the toilet.

Faith may indeed be the hope for things unseen, but there isn’t a lot of faith in the modern world outside of the Ummah, and they can hardly be called libertarians.

Read it.

Abdullah Mohammed, 51, of 125th Street, was at the Harlem supermarket yesterday morning when he started arguing loudly at the customer service desk with William Perry, 70, a former truck driver. Perry was at the desk buying Lotto tickets when Mohammed stepped on his foot, irking the older man, according to his older brother, Charles Perry.

Mohammed, who was clad in a peach linen suit, was booted out of the store, but stormed back in minutes later and cornered Perry in the meat aisle, two employees said. He then allegedly whipped out a razor and slashed Perry across the neck.

Bringing tribal Arabia home to the modern world. Them open borders sure are fun, aren’t they?

The Other McCain has some fun with the Gullible Media.

How many times do people have to make fools out of themselves over these “too good to check” stories before they wise up to the telltale clues of a hoax?

Good question. I guess being a journalism major isn’t the high-IQ thing that it purports to be.

Steve Sailer, of course, is tickled:

White guys … What would the world do without us? We’re the straw that stirs the drink.

Read it.

The tactic which has come into vogue, particularly for SEIU protests, is to go to your opponents’ home to protest, even if it means frightening the children in the house.

Pro-illegal immigrant groups in Rhode Island have taken it one step further, not only protesting in front of the home of Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Kilmartin, but also knocking on neighbors’ doors in protest of Rhode Island’s participation in the federal Secure Communities Program.

As detailed here before, Governor Linc Chafee and a host of others want to turn Rhode Island into a sanctuary state, refusing even to participate in the Secure Communities Program which requires that fingerprints for all people arrested on other charges be sent to Homeland Security for an immigration status check.  The feds say localities cannot opt out, and AG Kilmartin supports the program as a way of getting criminals out of the community.

Chafee has tried to prevent Rhode Island’s participation even after a plea from the victim of a kidnapping and rape committed by an illegal alien.