Read it.

What’s that in the sky? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Yup, it’s a plane, and it is currently 31,100 feet high and traveling to St. Louis from Chicago. Simply enter “planes overhead”, and Wolfram|Alpha will provide a list of flights overhead based on your current geoIP location.

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

Ooops — sorry — Predator drone. Well, we’ll miss you.

Read it.

Note that he isn’t a law professor at Catholic University; it’s as pure a case of gratuitously sticking your nose into other people’s business as I’ve been able to find.

Read it.

Never piss off a librarian.

Read it.

Küng, 41, rents out her guinea pigs, a service that has been in high demand in the Alpine nation ever since animal welfare rules were tightened up a few years ago. Switzerland has forbidden people from keeping lone guinea pigs because the animals are sociable and need each other’s company.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Personally, I’d rather inflict my low-rent presence on neighbors with more money than me than lord it over even lower rent folks than myself.

Much of the reason for zoning codes demanding large, expensive housing is to keep out low rent folks and their crime-prone, low test score kids.

Read it.

Overall, there has been a marked change of opinion in academia (see for instance Bryson and Freeman 2008 on this site). The idea that people are solely self-interested and materially orientated has been thrown overboard by leading scholars. Empirical research, in particular experimental research, has shown that under suitable conditions human beings care for the wellbeing of other persons. Above all, they are not solely interested in material gains (see eg Frey and Osterloh 2002). Recognition by co-workers is greatly important. Many workers are intrinsically motivated, ie they perform work for its own sake because it is found challenging and worth undertaking. This applies not only to qualified employees but also to persons fulfilling simple tasks. They often are proud of their work and performance.

Read it. And watch the video.

In 1949, President Harry Truman signed the Housing Act, which gave federal, state, and local governments unprecedented power to shape residential life. One of the Housing Act’s main initiatives – “urban renewal” –  destroyed about 2,000 communities in the 1950s and ’60s and forced more than 300,000 families from their homes. Overall, about half of urban renewal’s victims were black, a reality that led to James Baldwin’s famous quip that “urban renewal means Negro removal.”

Documenting the ‘progressive’ impulse to make things better by making them worse, and then looking around and saying, ‘What?’

New York City’s Manhattantown (1951) was one of the first projects authorized under urban renewal and it set the model not only for hundreds of urban renewal projects but for the next 60 years of eminent domain abuse at places such as Poletown, New London, and Atlantic Yards. The Manhattantown project destroyed six blocks on New York City’s Upper West Side, including an African-American community that dated to the turn of the century. The city sold the land for a token sum to a group of well-connected Democratic pols to build a middle-class housing development. Then came the often repeated bulldoze-and-abandon phenomenon: With little financial skin in the game, the developers let the demolished land sit vacant for years.

But Charlie Brown keeps running up to kick the football, no matter how many times Lucy pulls it away … and laughs.

The community destroyed at Manhattantown was a model for the tight-knit, interconnected neighborhoods later celebrated by Jane Jacobs and other critics of top-down redevelopment. In the early 20th century, Manhattantown was briefly the center of New York’s black music scene. A startling roster of musicians, writers, and artists resided there: the composer Will Marion Cook, vaudeville star Bert Williams, opera singer Abbie Mitchell, James Weldon Johnson and his brother Rosemond, muralist Charles Alston, writer and historian Arturo Schomburg, Billie Holiday (whose mother also owned a restaurant on 99th Street), Butterfly McQueen of “Gone with the Wind” fame, and the actor Robert Earl Jones.

A real community that doesn’t depend on government? Well, we can’t have that.

Read it. And watch the video.

Prior to the War on Poverty, the United States was getting more prosperous with each passing year and there were dramatic reductions in the level of destitution.

But once the federal government got involved in the mid-1960s, the good news evaporated. Indeed, the poverty rate has basically stagnated for the past 40-plus years, usually hovering around 13 percent depending on economic conditions.

Another remarkable finding in the video is that poor people in America rarely suffer from material deprivation. Indeed, they have wide access to consumer goods that used to be considered luxuries – and they also have more housing space than the average European (and with Europe falling apart, the comparisons presumably will become even more noteworthy).

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

Ben Dominech has a gimlet eye.

Does Perry have the heft to be president? This is a different question than you may think it is. It’s not about impressing the self-styled gatekeepers (leave them to their Santorum worship) in Washington and New York, who still think Rudy Giuliani has national appeal, have never shot a gun, and have no idea about the difference between a lease and a hunting lease (they also haven’t determined the outcome of a Republican primary since 1976). It’s about the donor community and the national conservative base, which overlaps. This requires different attributes, and more meaningful ones, than the often vacuous checkboxes of the national scene. Cain’s 9-9-9 plan appeals to the base not for its specifics but because it is a plan. It’s an improvement; it’s a sign of seriousness that goes a step further than rhetoric; and it puts a marker in the sand about what he believes economic policy should look like. Perry’s Texas handlers need to understand that no one has paid attention to Perry’s superb acumen in handling environmental regulatory issues over the past decade, for instance – it’s all new to them. Tim Pawlenty gave a series of pretty good policy speeches that went nowhere because he has the personality of reduced-fat cream cheese. Perry has the opposite problem – he has personality out the ears, but the only policy markers that national Republicans have heard thus far are that he loves Texas, Israel, immigrants, and getting some goats for our computer industry. He doesn’t need to be Paul Ryan, nor should he pretend to be. But he needs a plan, and he needs it soon, and it needs to be damn good. There’s an economic policy-only debate coming up on October 11 where Gardasil and immigration will be in the background; Perry should at least tease his economic plan there, and lay it out soon after.

Seth Godin is just a bundle of cheer.

Why do we believe that jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual and/or exported are going to come back ever? The internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created.

For which the only solution the left has, is to try to delay the inevitable by burning through other people’s money. And when that runs out, well, we’re back in the shit, only this time without the resources to build something new, the seed corn having been distributed in the form of welfare checks. Thanks a lot, guys.

Christopher Howse has standards. How weird is that?

Read it.

Dubbed G.hn, the ITU standard promises up to 1Gbps theoretical throughput, with real-world usage over electrical lines expected to reach between 250Mbps and 400Mbps. If that sounds appealing to you, you’re not alone. Service providers like the idea of G.hn since it allows them more flexibility than previous efforts. In fact, they like it so much that — despite G.hn’s capacity — they have insisted on quality of service standards that could limit or prevent consumers from installing it themselves after they buy adapters from retailers.

Read it.

The makers of the most expensive Burgundy wines have changed the rule book to make grape-picking by hand compulsory in bid to defend the region’s age-old traditions.

For the past fortnight, thousands of seasonal workers have been toiling under the autumn sun to pluck precious pinot noir grapes destined for Burgundy’s top quality red wines, its grands crus, using methods little changed since Cistercian monks cultivated the land 1,000 years ago.

Read it.

The IKEA Effect refers to the tendency for people to value things they have created/built themselves more than if made by someone else – in fact, nearly as much as if an expert had created the same item.

I can attest personally to the power of the IKEA effect.  We actually purchased an entire kitchen from IKEA, which I assembled and installed myself.  And it is a hundred times better than anything professionals could have made!

Read it.

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

Read it.

They asked if he would take a bullet for the President, and he said ‘Of course!’. I guess that’s what Nobel Laureates do.

Read it.

It was a sunny September afternoon at the mayor’s house on East 79^th street and Diana Taylor was talking to the two boisterous Laborador retrievers that she shares with her boyfriend, Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

I guess when you’re as rich as RINO Bloomberg, just having a pre-nup isn’t sufficiently secure. Best just not to get married at all. (That wouldn’t save you from ‘palimony’ in California, but this is New York, the Other Left Coast, which does these things the old fashioned way.)

She was even less sanguine about Obama. “I think that he’s a very intelligent man,” she said carefully. “And he has a lot to learn.”

Her voice took on a sharper edge. “For somebody’s who’s going to come in and be the great unifier—you know, that hopey-changey stuff—it hasn’t worked very well. The country is more divided now than it’s ever been. And he doesn’t appreciate other people and what they do. “

Even RINOs get the blues.

Read it.

Presumably there’s a measuring stick somewhere that has the appropriate units for ‘intensity’.

Steve Sailer loves to poke around.

For the last couple of decades, there has been a popular theological concept that every living human being was 100% descended from modern humans who came Out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, so therefore there hasn’t been enough time for evolution to cause any changes among people, so, therefore, Science Proves the complete genetic equality of all human racial groups.

So, what happened to the not-so-modern humans who were around back then, like the Neanderthals? Well, to Prove Racism Wrong, they had to have been utterly exterminated, the victims of a 100% genocide with no living descendants whatsoever. You see, old theories that some of the old non-African humans weren’t completely obliterated were racist, because that would imply that living humans aren’t all identical by descent, so they had to be utterly wrong. So, the old humans had to die. You can’t make anti-racist omelet without exterminating a few lineages.

In reality, it’s not actually a good idea to get too worked up over some theory you hold about the distant past. It’s especially not a good idea to create political/moral/religious dogmas dependent upon some assumption you make about the far past. You never know what somebody might dig up.

Read it.

The diary was put together by a former SAS soldier shortly after the original regiment was disbanded in 1945. He preserved as much documentation as he could, compiling a scrapbook of photographs, operational orders and afteraction reports from its origins in North Africa through Italy, France and the drive on Berlin.

The diary, which weighs 25lb and was bound in leather “liberated” from the Nazis, was locked away for half a century with no one aware of its existence. Shortly before the unnamed soldier’s death a decade ago he handed it over the SAS Regimental Association.

Read it.

I thought of that Barbie column that when reading part one of a Deseret News feature that ran under the headline, “The end of innocence: The cost of sexualizing kids.”

This may sound strange, here at GetReligion, but one of the strongest points of this feature is that it seriously downplays the religion side of this subject, leaning instead on source after source after source from mainstream academia and other research organizations. It’s hard to count them all.

The story starts in the tarted-up atmosphere of the typical American shopping mall — in Salt Lake City, the big city in the middle of Mormon territory. You walk along with the young families and their young children, seeing what there is to see. Then the story moves you into the land of pre-teen and teen television.

Read it.

Short answer ? Islam has “unhappy ending” written all over it.

Tragically, for Islam there is no possibility of a happy ending. It has often been said that the only peace which Islam ? famously known as “The Religion of Peace” ? offers anyone is the peace of the grave. Pakistan ? which means “land of the pure” ?provides the best evidence of this in that it is a prototypical Islamic nation intended to mirror the everyday rule of shari’a law. That country’s horrific level of almost daily slaughter and mayhem clearly demonstrates how ? even if Islam were to attain global ascendancy ? the violence and terrorism would never stop.

The Islamic concept of takfir (“impure”), literally assures this in that a more devout Muslim is religiously sanctioned for killing a less pure Muslim. This lack of purity could be interpreted as someone who does not pray all five times a day or consumes food during daylight hours over the course of Ramadan. The possible paths descending into Islamic “impurity” are as numerous as they are varied and it is an ironclad guarantee that Islam will always be torn by internecine violence.

Read it. And watch the video.

Read it.

Traits that make great software testers _ intense focus, comfort with repetition, memory for detail _ also happen to be characteristics of autism. People with Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism, have normal to high intelligence and often are highly skilled with computers.

Aspiritech, a nonprofit in Highland Park, Ill., nurtures these skills while forgiving the quirks that can make adults with autism unemployable: social awkwardness, poor eye contact, being easily overwhelmed. The company’s name plays on the words “Asperger’s,” “spirit” and “technology.”

Read it.

Huh — perhaps AlGore really can serve as an alternative to fossil fuels.

Read it.

US researchers say they have demonstrated how cells fuelled by bacteria can be “self-powered” and produce a limitless supply of hydrogen.

Cool.

However, the team added, the current cost of operating the new technology is too high to be used commercially.

Oh … another ‘green’ ‘alternative’ source of energy that will no doubt require massive taxpayer subsidies. Boring….

Read it.

Cases dealing with apostasy in Islam—whereby Muslims who convert to other religions are tortured and executed—are on the rise and need to be acknowledged for what they are: one of Islam’s most visible attempts to suppress the human conscience—a phenomenon that has dire implications beyond religious freedom.

As for the Uganda anecdote, Susan’s father actually opted to follow the most lenient form of punishment allowed for apostasy: while Islam’s three Sunni schools of law condemn the apostate to death, the Hanafi School “progressively” advocates beating and imprisoning females until they see the “error of their ways” and return to Islam.

Likewise, though Susan’s father was arrested, he was “quickly released,” doubtless because the authorities recognized that he was only upholding Islam.

To all the relativists out there, they have but one question to ask themselves: where is the other religion that kills defectors? There are none; only gangs, not religions, exhibit such a “mafia” mentality—hence the argument that Islam is more a political system than a religion.

Steve Sailer keeps trying to fix what’s wrong with the country. I admire his optimism.

However, there have long been complaints about the SAT. The most fashionable involved The Gap. Whites averaged higher scores than blacks. This posed a major PR problem for the academic establishment. The SAT (and ACT) is essential for their continued thriving, but saying that blacks are less intelligent than whites on average is The Worst Thing in the Whole World. But that’s what the SAT says. And the SAT is the cornerstone of academic elitism, which has made American academia globally the envy of the academic world.

Thus, over the last half century or so, there have been anguished discussions between the front men for the academic world and the psychometricians at ETS about how to Close the Gap, without throwing the baby of predictive power out with the bathwater.

So much for the ‘reality-based community’. Unfortunately, the delusions of the upper classes have deleterious effects on us all.

But white parents still tend to assume that SAT stands for Scholastic Aptitude Test. It’s not an achievement test in their heads. The College Board says there is no point in studying extra hard for the SAT, and why would a prestigious not-for-profit institution spin the truth? If you can’t trust the College Board, who can you trust? And signing your child up for intensive test prepping would be unfair to poor blacks who can’t afford all that tutoring and drilling. Plus, prepping for years would be a lot of work for little Taylor, so just let him have his fun.

Meanwhile, lots of people from Fujian are showing up in America whose merchant ancestors ascended to mandarin status by spending their mercantile profits at Confucian literature cram schools for their sons. The assumptions about the SAT flitting around in white people’s heads would never occur to them. “Test prep is unfair to poor blacks? Huh? You crack me up! I like you! You are very funny!”

Somebody (was it John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia? I forrget) once wrote that there wasn’t anything wrong with any major American city that dumping about a million ethnic Chinese on it couldn’t fix. That sounds about right. Look at Singapore.

Not surprisingly, we see vast amounts of white upper middle class rage directed at Amy Chua.

In America today, 98% of the thinking devoted to college admissions goes to figuring out how your own kid can claw his way to the top, and the other 2% goes to airy handwaving theorizing about Closing The Gap. That leaves 0% devoted to thinking about improving the system overall.

Read it.

And you think your job is tough….

Tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Check it out.

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

Check it out.

Read it.

Don Boudreaux, Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University, calls out know-it-all politicians.

Here’s a quick question for anyone who takes seriously politicians’ pronouncements about what particular industries are “vital” or are “of the future” or are “crucial to meeting consumers’ needs”: Why do virtually none of these politicians, when they leave office, found their own non-political firms – firms that specialize neither in granting clients access to incumbent politicians nor in projects that depend upon getting subsidies or other favors from those same politicians?

In Texas we have a saying: All Hat and No Cattle. I suspect that it applies often in politics.

But surely if, say, President Jimmy Carter was as smart and as full of correct foresight as he would have had to be in order for sensible people to take seriously his late-1970s pronouncements on the future of America’s energy economy, he could have made a personal fortune, starting at 12:01pm on 20 January 1981, launching and running an energy company (or, more precisely, a synthetic-energy company).  Yet he didn’t even try.  He selfishly denied to Americans – indeed, to the world – the blessings of synfuels.

And what of Pres. Obama?  Even if he wins a second term in the White House, he’ll be only 55 years old when he leaves office.  Will he found and run a health-insurance company?  How about a ‘green’ energy firm?  Or will he, perhaps, found and run a firm specializing in offering middle- and low-income Americans better and more fully disclosed access to consumer credit?  Will he create a successful automobile firm?

I’ll bet (seriously) a good deal of money that he’ll do none of these things.  He’ll not even try.  And for good reason: not only does he know nothing about these matters, he knows nothing about finding investors willing to stake their own funds, or about finding skilled workers and managers willing to cooperate together in such upstart enterprises, so that such enterprises become realities with real prospects for success.

He knows no more about the economic matters upon which he pronounces than does a soap-opera actor portraying a physician know about cardiology or obstetrics.

Read it.

Old-time egalitarian societies were just too stable to survive in a dog-eat-dog world, according to Stanford University researchers, a situation which led to them being overrun by the stratified societies which dominate humanity today.

The study used a computer simulation to compare demographic stability and rates of migration for societies that shared everything equally and those that had a class structure with those on top controlling most of the resources.

 The researchers found that, when resources were consistently scarce, egalitarian societies didn’t have the motivation to change their ways because they shared out the pain, but in unequal communities, the have-nots tended to go in search of a better life when things got bad.

If resources fluctuated, the class societies were the ones that were stable because the ruling class always had plenty, so they expanded, while the sharing and caring communities found it hard to adapt and once again stayed as they were.

I hope this isn’t the same computer software they use to do the Global Warming simulations.

Read it.

When your alarm clock doesn’t go off, you can thank a humble enzyme for getting you out of bed, scientists at the Salk Institute reveal in research published today.

Researchers examining the mechanisms that control our sleep have found the chemical reaction that makes us stir abruptly, throw the cat off the bed and stumble blinking into the bathroom.