Class warfare comes to Britain.

Or maybe it never left.

There may be an argument for high-speed rail in places that have people wanting to go long distances between major metropolitan areas, such as the U.S., China, India, Russia, etc., but no case whatever has been made for needing it in Britain, where you can get pretty much anywhere in the country in six hours by car and ten by rail. The railroads in Britain suck, and have ever since they were nationalized after WWII; this is not Sherlock Holmes territory any more).

So why build high-speed rail in Britain? Why, because all the Cool Kids are doing high-speed rail.

“A vocal minority are determined to block our ambitious proposals to create a railway fit for the 21st century,” he said.

“It is important that all those who are in favour make themselves heard by responding to the consultation under way so that we put the national interest ahead of purely local interests. ”

Can’t have Britain without the latest toys, even though they can’t even afford a decent Navy any more.

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Chinese developers are making knock-offs of European towns.

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California currently ranks #49 among U.S. states for “business tax climate” (Tax Foundation) and #48 for for “economic freedom” (Mercatus).  It shouldn’t be any surprise then that companies are leaving the “Golden State” in record numbers this year (see chart above) for “golder pastures” and more business-friendly climates in other states.

And who could blame them?

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I am not making this up.

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A commenter on Jerry Pournelle’s site has said that it would be cheaper to have Pakistan as an enemy than as an ally, and it struck me that one could make a long list of places for which that would be true.

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And over the cliff they goooooooooooo….

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Being the last place that anyone would look.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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….

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“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.

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Steve Sailer gets into some strange stuff….

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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This is pretty cool … if it actually works.

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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.

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

Coincidence? I think not….

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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.

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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.

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Look for … the Union label ….

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.