Read it.

The world is full of pointless activity.

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We’ve been puzzling over the Author’s Guild’s decision to sue several university libraries for participating in the digitization and storage of millions of works (largely in connection with the Google Books project) and making scans of some of those works available to the academic community. Simply put, it appears that the Guild is dead set on wasting time and money addressing imaginary harms, whether or not its efforts might actually benefit either its members or the public.

What puzzles me is why anybody pays attention to a group suing on behalf of people who are not members of their group. How do they have what we lawyers like to call ‘standing’?

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We have the technology.

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His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like
underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy
who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those
boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at
high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one
of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

 

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But in a few years, the government will require electric cars and gasoline-electric hybrids to emit some type of noise at low speeds, when their battery-driven motors usually run silent. The promised rules—aimed at making the vehicles safer for vision-impaired pedestrians and others who rely on aural cues—have launched auto makers on a quest for the perfect sound.

Well, a 5-liter V-8 doesn’t have these problems. Just sayin’.

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Desmond FitzGerald, the 29th and last Knight of Glin who died on September 14 aged 74, was a connoisseur of the decorative arts who worked for the Victoria and Albert Museum and the fine art auctioneers Christie’s and, as a campaigning president of the Irish Georgian Society, helped to save many architectural treasures over the Irish Sea from dereliction or insensitive development.

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When people become aware of the dangers of Islamization, they tend to take an interest in the Koran. Rather than rely on what the media or Muslims tell them, they decide to examine Islam’s holy book for themselves, and turn to the internet for help.

Needless to say, the best resources on the Koran are on Islamic sites. You can find anything you want from the Koran, in any language. However, the presentation at such sites is from a Muslim point of view, and doesn’t generally point the reader to the wife-beating or Jew-killing or infidel-beheading verses.

That’s not true of TheQuran.com. It contains detailed easy-to-use analysis of the Koran, produced by Arabic-speaking scholars from both Christian and apostate backgrounds. It is one of the more useful reference sites on the subject that I’ve come across: you can look up verses by topic, or you can search on keywords, or simply browse the contents. It also has a series of articles on particular suras and verses of interest.

It will scare you shitless, like Mein Kampf if Hitler had been on a mission from God.

Read it.

Australians applying for new passports now have an extra choice in the gender field, after authorities allowed transgendered people to nominate their official gender as “indeterminate”.

Makes you wonder what kind of she-it they’re going to come up with next.

Maybe they ought to have a spot on the cover that says ‘Y-chromosome [ ] Y [ ] N’.

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

Nineteenth-century American newspapers were, in general, partisan in their politics, and the New York World was a Democrat paper. In 1863, two writers for the World, George Wakeman and David Goodman Croly, wrote a 72-page pamphlet that was published anonymously with the title, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro.

The “Miscegenation Hoax” was a political dirty trick by Democrats from start to finish, and demonstrates how the party has always opportunistically exploited racial animosity for partisan advantage. Indeed, it is one of the marvels of world history that the Democrats, who spent the first 150 years of their existence winning elections by appealing to white racism, were able to become the party of “civil rights” without so much as a blush of shame. (“Civil rights” requiring scare-quotes to convey its actual meaning as a partisan slogan used by Democrats, exactly as “miscegenation” was originally coined for partisan purposes.)

I don’t even have to say anything.

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After reportedly feeding a crowd of five thousand with five loaves and two fishes, Jesus Christ of Nazareth was recently served with formal legal notice from industry trade associations, demanding that he cease and desist from what they charge is an illegal food-sharing operation under the terms of the Miracle Millennium Anti-Replication Act (MMAA).

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I never realized before how much Henry Waxman does, indeed, look like Gollum.

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Professor at his first lecture of the semester to Canadian university students: “Despite what you may have heard elsewhere, everyone is not entitled to their opinion. ‘All Jews should be sterilized’ would be an example of an unacceptable and dangerous opinion.”

Student misunderstands, and launches attack on professor for being anti-Semitic. When the context was explained to her, she refused to relent: “The words, ‘Jews should be sterilized’ still came out of his mouth, so regardless of the context I still think that’s pretty serious.” (Anyone who says “Jehovah” will get stoned!)

So a professor urging his students to be Politically Correct gets busted for being Politically Incorrect. We live in the Irony Age.

More here. This is going to provide right-wing humor for at least a year.

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I’m confident that her grandchildren’s views would horrify Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, as well.

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Over the course of a quarter-century, a journalist witnessed the transformation of George W. Bush.

.

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“It feels like a recessionary environment. What they call it later on I can’t tell you,” says Bart van Ark, chief economist of the Conference Board, who put the odds of recession at 45%. Since 1988, every time the Conference Board’s estimate of the probability of recession topped 40%, a downturn followed shortly thereafter. “The consumer has never really thought that we got out of the recession,” he adds.

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One of the politicians instrumental in creating the TSA, Rep. John Mica, who wrote the legislation that established the TSA, has apparently decided that the whole thing has been a failure and should be dismantled. He notes that “the whole program has been hijacked by bureaucrats.”

‘Unexpectedly’. Don’t forget to include ‘unexepectedly’ before ‘hijacked’, to fit in with the Democrat narrative.

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Archaeologists working outside Vienna, Austria, have discovered the remains of a huge school for ancient Roman gladiators—a complex so extensive that it rivals the training grounds outside Rome’s Colosseum.

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Eventually the jackals start eating each other. Basic ‘progressive’ principle: What we call fairness applies to Them, not to Us.

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Read it.

The startup’s site aggregates information on plants and vegetables, offers growing skills and techniques, hints and tips for needed activities to become a personal farming resource. Through the site’s social functionality, users can share opinions or growing advice, connecting to each other and even exchanging produce. Grow The Planet is also location-enabled, allowing users to view a map to see what users are close, what they’re growing, and pops down (instead of pins) tomatoes and other veggies so you can see what produce is available around you. And, hey, even offer a neighbor a snack of cucumbers.

However, the core of the platform lies in the possiblity for each user to design their own vegetable garden, on their balcony or indoors, and receive tips on what is needed to grow vegetables according to the season, climate zone, weather, etc. The startup brings in extensive research on growth statistics and the integration with climate data and user input to add breadth to the platform.

Kind of like one of those electronic pets, that people spend money on and abandon within a month or two.

Read it.

In case you haven’t heard, the 2012 presidential election is already over and the Republicans stole it. Both Rolling Stone and Mother Jones report this week that those wascally Wepublicans have already walked away with the ballot boxes.

Well, that certainly takes some of the suspense away.

Apparently it’s fascist to require the same ID for voting that you need for driving, watching adult movies, buying cigarettes, and drinking alcohol. (Those are all more important than voting, you see; nobody cares about what happens during elections so long as Democrats win.)

Read it.

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

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Mr. le Dous, 56, a power plant engineer, rides a bike himself, as do his children, though he also has a car. He just wishes bikers would behave.

“We call cyclists the plague of the pavement,” he said.

The downside of being a Yuppie Heaven. Funny how the people in New York and Los Angeles who are such big proponents of biking do not, so far as I can tell, themselves ride bicycles.

Read it. And watch the video. A Pepto-Bismol moment.

“I’ll put it this way, you don’t deserve to keep all of it. It’s not a question of deserving, because what government is, is those things that we decide to do together,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) told the Don Wade & Roma show on WLS-AM.

“I think you need to pay your fair share for things we’ve decided are our national priorities,” Schakowsky added.

Don’t really need to say anything, do I?

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“It needs to be a federal entitlement,” Romney said. “I will save Social Security financially as a federal program.”

Which tags Romney as a RINO. Now, a RINO is better than nothing (and nothing at all would be better than Obama), but let’s not have John-McCain-With-Hair as the Republican nominee — that’s how we got in this mess in the first place.

Arnold Kling is always worth reading.

The paradox is this. A job seeker is looking for something for a well-defined job. But the trend seems to be that if a job can be defined, it can be automated or outsourced. The marginal product of people who need well-defined jobs is declining. The marginal product of people who can thrive in less structured environments is increasing.

Megan McArdle takes the ball and runs with it.

Why is this troubling?  Aren’t routine jobs stifling? Soul-destroying? A tool of the oppressive overclass?

Well, that’s what we used to say when we had more than enough to go around.  The assembly-line was grinding modern man into just another machine part; the stultifying conformity of the white collar world was producing a nation of anal-retentive Casper Milquetoasts.

Then the jobs started to go away and we discovered that many people like dreary predictability–at least, compared to the real-world alternative, which is risk.  What many, maybe most, people actually want, it turns out, is the creativity and autonomy of entrepreneurship combined with the stability of a 1950s corporate drone.  This is a fantasy, of course, but given their druthers, it’s not clear that most people will pick risk over dronedom.

Unfortunately, they’re being given no choice.  Even if we stopped outsourcing, we’re not going to somehow stop automation.

UPDATE: Smitty at The Other McCain kicks the extra point.

Restated, jobs that involve information management, especially in well-bounded cases, are readily re-stated in software.

So, knowing how to

• write code,
• administer information systems,
• do jobs that have a significant ‘real-world’ component (fixing cars),
• involve creativity,
• are not easily structured in code (customer service)

are likely to remain longer.

Back on topic, though, the Information Age has blown away vast swaths of the private sector, and is even now crushing the public sector. Private citizens just do not require the government, especially the federal government, managing their birth, housing, health, education, employment, and retirement. Private citizens do not need legions of civil servants reading email, shuffling from meeting to meeting, and emitting PowerPoint all day. This must stop.

Read it.

Some grubby details: the US poverty line is calculated as being three times the food bill of a family in the early 1960s, upgraded over time for inflation. Doesn’t matter whether that’s a good definition or not, that’s just what it is.

When we calculate who is in poverty, who is below the poverty line, we include in the income said person or family gets their market income (of course) and also any cash that they get given directly by the government to alleviate their poverty. This seems sensible enough really, if you’ve got more cash you’re less poor than if you don’t have more cash.

However, we do not include in that household’s income all of the other things we do to alleviate poverty. We don’t include free medical care, or maybe help with the rent of an apartment or house. We don’t include any help that comes through the tax system nor do we include any vouchers: like Food Stamps for example.

In other words, it’s all bogus. Your tax dollars at work.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Strikingly, Mann defines globalization as bringing about the dawning of the “Homogenocene”—the era of cultural and even biological homogenization. Proponents of globalization like to congratulate themselves on fostering diversity—that great talisman word of our age—the reality is that the world is becoming, in many ways, more homogeneous. Diets, for example, became more similar around the world in the wake of Columbus.

There are, by nature, two kinds of diversity: micro and macro. Globalization drives the world toward micro-diversity, but away from macro-diversity. Practically every strip mall in Los Angeles, for example, features a Mexican taco restaurant, a Cambodian donut shop, and an East Asian nail salon. Each strip mall is therefore diverse within itself. Yet, even the most ardent diversiphile has to admit that every strip mall seems an awful lot like every other strip mall in L.A.

I really like the redesigned format for VDARE.COM. Much more readable.

One definition of “dystopia” is “a society characterized by human misery, such as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.”

For example, an American city run by Democrats. Detroit comes immediately to mind, as does Los Angeles.

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Last month WEAC announced that it was laying off 40% of its staff.  With little over which to collectively bargain, and with dues no longer withheld from paychecks, the need for and sustainability of a union bureaucracy could not be justified.

Now WEAC is being boycotted by National Staff Organization (NSO), a union representing educational union employees.

Isn’t that great, education union employees have their own union?  Is there a union for employees of education union employee unions?

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The Somali jihadist organization al-Shabaab did not exist a decade ago. Today, its success in recruiting and radicalizing Muslims inside the United States has made al-Shabaab “a direct threat to the U.S. homeland,” according to an investigative report by the House Homeland Security Committee.

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

Read it.

A Japanese company claims to have invented the world’s first artificial intelligence “chat robots” designed specifically to converse with English language students.

Forget them, the people who need it are the ones learning Japanese.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Well, Slovenia got over socialism; Britain hasn’t yet.

An Informative Chart.

Andrew Ferguson is rather dyspeptic today.

Here’s how the go-to guy works. Let’s say you’re a reporter on a deadline and you need a quote right this minute about how Republicans have rendered Congress dysfunctional. Well then, your go-to guy is Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Perhaps you want to give readers a little historical perspective, something eggheady about, say, how smoothly leaders of both parties used to work together before the lunatics (you know who they are) started running the asylum on Capitol Hill? Quick: get “presidential historian” Douglas Brinkley on the phone before he goes live on the NewsHour! He’ll be sure to tell you, with a wistful air, that Tip O’Neill and President Reagan were always friends after five o’clock.

If it’s the economy you’re writing about, it’s Mark Zandi. He has all the qualities that go into making a go-to guy of the very first rank. He is fluent on television and keeps his sentences short. His demeanor is pleasant. He uses the word “narrative” with abandon—“narrative” being the hottest word in journalism since “transparency”; it’s this year’s “accountability.” And he’s a liberal. All go-to guys are liberals. They can’t be identified as such, lest their authority as disinterested observers be undermined and the reader or viewer begin to get ideas. Ideological fuzziness is good; ideological hermaphroditism is better.

Boy, that sure sounds familiar.

You will notice that these statements share two prominent features. First, they’re predictions and, second, they’re wrong. More frequently than most go-to guys, Zandi volunteers not merely subtly shaded opinions, not merely Ornsteinian “context” and Brinklean “perspective,” but bald predictions about how matters will lie a year or two or three from now. Over time, Zandi’s predictions are tested by reality. In August 2006, he told Newsweek that housing prices would bottom out in August 2007. In October 2007, he told the National Association of Home Builders that the bottom would come in late 2008. In April 2009, he told Time magazine that housing prices would bottom out by the end of the year. (“I feel very confident about this,” he said.) Three months later, he told NPR that “by this time next year, the market will have hit bottom.” The market is still looking for its bottom, and so is Zandi, with both hands.

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Boy, there’s a shocker.

Now, since the Obamassiah, Smartest Guy in the Room, would naturally have known that any plan including taxes is not going to pass the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and hence has no chance of passing into law, what could his motive be for introducing it and demanding that WE MUST PASS THIS NOW? Surely it couldn’t be politics; after all, he explicitly called for an end to ‘political games’. So there must be some other motive — what could it be? what could it be?

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Be the first on your block.

Doctors removed a billion of his T-cells — a type of white blood cell that fights viruses and tumors — and gave them new genes that would program the cells to attack his cancer. Then the altered cells were dripped back into Mr. Ludwig’s veins.

At first, nothing happened. But after 10 days, hell broke loose in his hospital room. He began shaking with chills. His temperature shot up. His blood pressure shot down. He became so ill that doctors moved him into intensive care and warned that he might die. His family gathered at the hospital, fearing the worst.

A few weeks later, the fevers were gone. And so was the leukemia.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Dozens of Americans who claim to have been made ill by wi-fi and mobile phones have flocked to the town of Green Bank, West Virginia.

Diane Schou is unable to hold back the tears as she describes how she once lived in a shielded cage to protect her from the electromagnetic radiation caused by waves from wireless communication.

“It’s a horrible thing to have to be a prisoner,” she says. “You become a technological leper because you can’t be around people.

Read it.

Further adventures in the mythical world of ‘intellectual property’.

‘Nobody knows who owns the rights to these books, but we’re a group of authors and so we have the right to stop you using them!’ Uh, guys, mind your own business. If you have an interest here (i.e. it’s one of your books), then come talk to us. Otherwise, STFU.

Read it.

An economic concept that requires a deep understanding of how to use and manipulate fractions is elasticity: the percentage change in X/percentage change in Y. I wonder: how many students struggle with elasticity formulas because they struggle to manipulate and understand fractions?

Another aspect of the mental arithmetic gap that is easily overlooked is its widening over time. Calculators became affordable in the mid- to late-1970s. Students in the 1980s were taught by teachers who had learned mathematics without calculators, and could do basic mental arithmetic. Students today might be taught by a teacher who is himself unable to work out 37+16 without help. The consequences are neatly described in an “Alex” cartoon I have on my fridge about a proposal to ban the use of calculators in school. “Faced with home work which requires him to work out simple sums in his head today’s lazy seven-year-old will instinctively turn to the quick and easy method of arriving at the answer… i.e. asking his dad, who, embarrassingly also wouldn’t have a clue without a calculator.”

I don’t imagine things are any better in the U.S.

Recent research is suggesting that deep understanding of mathematical concepts is related to basic number sense. A person who can look at two sets of dots and quickly determine which set is larger will also generally be better at abstract, conceptual, mathematical reasoning. I have had a student in my office who could not work out 3×5=? without a calculator. I wonder: what else was she missing out on?

Indeed.

Read it.

More than 500 days of talks to form a government have seen Belgium take from Iraq the dubious honor of taking the longest time ever to form a government, prompting attacks by bond vigilantes as well as international ridicule.

But with economic growth in the country now surpassing that of many of its euro zone peers, are Belgians having the last laugh? The Belgian economy grew 0.7 percent in the second quarter, outpacing growth in the euro zone as a whole and significantly better than Germany, traditionally Europe’s growth engine, which recorded a meager 0.1 percent growth in the second quarter.

Maybe we ought to try that in the U.S.

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Your tax dollars at work. They don’t care, they already have a job, one that’s a lot safer than yours. And besides, you’re just a bunch of poopy-head polluters, so there.

The problem with narrowly focused agencies like the EPA is that the mechanics of what they do requires them to develop a form of tunnel vision — it doesn’t matter whether what they do is smart or stupid, they have to continue to do it regardless because (a) the law requires it and (b) if they don’t do it, no matter how justified their forbearance, they look like they aren’t doing anything … so they get sued by environazis or their funding gets cut or the administrator loses his job or they might even be abolished. So there’s every reason to press ahead with stupid regulations and no reason not to.

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Swedish police arrested three Somali men and an Iraqi Saturday night on suspicion they were plotting to attack an art fair at a landmark gallery in Goteborg.

That’s some fine Religion 0′ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Read more at: http://www.investigativeproject.org/3167/possible-attack-thwarted-in-sweden

Read it.

A new earth-shattering and metaphysically incontrovertible study is out, this one saying that watching SpongeBob SquarePants can cause learning problems in little kids. How bad is it? According to a USA Today writeup, “just nine minutes of that program can cause short-term attention and learning problems in 4-year-olds.”

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

Michelle Malkin is on the hunt for Obama’s uncle Onyango, who (despite being under a deportation order) was apparently released by the Keystone Kops in charge of our immigration system, if one may use the term so loosely.

Uncle Omar is once again the beneficiary of America’s reckless immigration catch-and-release policies.

He has been quietly released from federal custody and all lips are sealed. DHS won’t say a word. The White House won’t say a word. Onyango Obama’s immediate family in Boston won’t say a word. And the lawyer who was all set to appeal his deportation is out of the loop.

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Never lend money. You’ll never get it back.

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But it has to be passed RIGHT NOW, even though it doesn’t exist.

“Congress should pass this bill right now,” Jarrett said on MSNBC. No more than one minute later, Jarrett said the White House is still writing the bill and it will be submitted to Congress next week.

Well, let’s not get into some picky little squabble about what exists and what doesn’t exist — WE HAVE TO PASS THE BILL NOW so that we can find out what’s in it. (This is the Pelosi Method.)

Read it.

So long as the West focuses on names and faces in the so-called “war on terror”—as opposed to focusing on ideas and motivations—so long will it possibly win battles, even as it slowly loses the war.

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According to the report, Apple’s proposed “Campus 2 Project” is a classic example of “pastoral capitalism,” a label coined by UC Berkeley professor Louise A. Mozingo. The term refers to an American tendency for a corporation “to turn its back on cities and stake a claim on the suburban pastoral idyll — isolated, proprietary, verdant, and disengaged from civic space,” a description that Hawthorne believes perfectly fits Apple’s planned headquarters.

‘Capitalism’ here being used, of course, not in its accurate technical sense, but in its PC sense of ‘something the left doesn’t like’; I’m surprised they didn’t call it ‘pastoral fascism’, the other PC term that the left uses as a synonym for ‘something the left doesn’t like’.

There’s no pleasing some people.