Read it.

We’ve certainly talked about how ridiculous patents have gotten in the way of health care professionals and doctors providing the best care they can. Beyond basic things like gene patents, the idea that diagnostic tests are patentable is somewhat horrifying for anyone with any sense of decency when it comes to trying to keep people healthy. But, apparently the issue doesn’t stop there, and the medical community is suddenly grappling with some doctors using aggressive copyright enforcement to block competing diagnostic tests from being available.

As I shall ever maintain, the whole concept of ‘intellectual property’ is bogus.

Read it.

I was wondering when some country would start doing this. Given Britain’s money troubles, it makes sense.

Unfortunately, this sort of ‘training’ don’t produce the reflexes and muscle memory that live training does.

But I suppose it’s better than nothing.

Read it.

Oh, yeah, diversity. Great stuff, ain’t it?

At your expense.

Gates of Vienna cites its sources.

The source I cited was ’Umdat al-salik wa ’uddat al-nasik, or The reliance of the traveller and tools of the worshipper. It is usually referred to as Reliance of the Traveller when quoted in English. My references were from the Revised Edition (published 1991, revised 1994), which is billed as “The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law ’Umdat al-Salik by Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri (d. 769/1368) in Arabic with Facing English Text, Commentary, and Appendices”, edited and translated by Nuh Ha Mim Keller. The publisher is listed as amana publications in Beltsville, Maryland.

The book is considered an authoritative source on Sunni Islamic law because it is certified as such by Al-Azhar University in Cairo. There is no higher authority on Sunni Islamic doctrine than Al-Azhar. To give the book additional gravitas, it has also been certified as an authoritative source of Islamic law by the governments of Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.

Reliance of the Traveller is thus a useful tool for us “Islamophobes”, since no Muslim can credibly assert that it does not represent the “true Islam”.

I have a copy. It makes for interesting reading. You ought to get a copy, too. It’s not that expensive, less than $26 at Amazon — a cheap price to pay for the enemy’s playbook.

Under sharia, all human actions are either halal (permitted) or haram (forbidden). If the Koran mentions an action as having either status, that codifies it completely. Similarly, if the sayings of Mohammed (in the hadith) mention an action with approval or disapproval, it is codified in the law as halal or haram respectively.

Since Mohammed was the perfect man, whose life serves as an example for all Muslims to emulate, an action becomes automatically halal if Mohammed is known to have engaged in it. This is why beheading Jews or marrying nine-year-old girls is legal under sharia.

You can run, but you can’t hide.

Read it.

So why do you pay taxes? Ask Obama — after all, he’s The Smartest Guy In The Room™.

(Two words: ‘concealed carry’)

Read it.

There is nothing new under the sun.

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It isn’t until you get to #19 on the list that you hit one that leans Republican.

After all, Republicans are the Party of the Rich™. Everybody knows that.

Read it.

The number of women from Britain’s ethnic communities coming forward to report so-called “honour” attacks has more than doubled in three years, new figures show.

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

Read it.

As Muslims never tire of reminding us, Islam is not just a religion; it’s an “entire way of life”.

The technical term for which is ‘totalitarian’.

For example, from the authoritative source on Sunni Islamic law ’Umdat al-salik wa ’uddat al-nasik, or The reliance of the traveller and tools of the worshipper — commonly referred to as Reliance of the Traveller when cited in English — we learn this useful information (from Book O, “Justice”):

o1.2 The following are not subject to retaliation:

	[…]
(2)	a Muslim for killing a non-Muslim;
	[…]
(4)	a father or mother (or their fathers of mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring; …

Read it.

Heather Peters is an angry consumer who knows she has little chance of winning a war with Honda Motor Co. and its army of high-priced lawyers.

The Los Angeles resident is miffed that her 2006 Honda Civic hybrid doesn’t get its claimed fuel economy. And she isn’t satisfied with a proposed class-action lawsuit settlement that would give trial lawyers $8.5 million while Civic owners would get as little as $100 and rebate coupons for the purchase of a new vehicle.

Barring lawyers from courtrooms could lead to the same counter-intuitive but positive results as removing traffic signals and signs from roads and intersections.

If she’s successful in getting others to follow her example, Peters could inspire a whole new litigation strategy in the auto industry and other businesses. Working together but filing lawsuits independently, consumers could force companies to go mano a mano with individual plaintiffs in far-flung courtrooms nationwide.

Call it a small-claims flash mob.

Look for legislators (the best that money can buy, and most of them lawyers themselves) to run, not walk, to ban this ‘loophole’.

Read it.

Notice that this sort of thing happens in blue states like Minnesota, not red states like Texas.

Notice also that the rioters were not white people. Deduce from that what you will.

The moral, I suppose, is that civilization faces various threats against which we do not yet have adequate antidotes.

Other than, oh, say, armed citizens who would quell such riots before they properly begin. As sometimes happens in, oh, red states like Texas.

Minnesota has a shall-issue concealed carry law that’s worked well, despite the metro DFL’s prediction of street bloodbaths. But the law does allow establishments to ban concealed carry, and the Mall of America does so. Which is one reason I rarely go there. I figure I can go other places that choose not to make me an easy target.

The problem with leaving such civil disorders for the police to handle is that when police aren’t on hand you have no recourse. It’s difficult for a corpse to get much satisfaction from suing some gang-banger who’s probably on welfare anyway.

Read it.

We don’t have many Democrats, for one thing.

Read it.

Over time, the neurons in your brain are going to change. And that’s only natural. When you experience a new event, your brain encodes the memory by altering the connections between neurons, which is caused by turning on several genes within these neurons. Recenty, a team of neuroscientists at MIT published their findings in the Dec. 23rd issue of Science in which the group was able to pinpoint some of the exact locations of memory formation within the brain.

Read it.

Most so-called “high-skilled” immigrants (scientists, engineers, computer programmers, and the like) come to the United States under the H-1B visa program. Congress caps the number of visas issued at 65,000 each year and allows an additional 20,000 exceptions for immigrants with advanced U.S. degrees.

Last week U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services announced that the Fiscal Year 2012 cap was reached, which was two months ahead of last year’s pace. ComputerWorld noted that before the recession, the cap was routinely reached in just a week. It took only one day in 2007.

A number of people associated with National Review argue that every degree from an American University ought to come with a green card for those who need them. That certainly might serve to balance a little the guys who are digging the drug-running tunnels under the Mexican border.

Read it.

He could hardly do any worse than 40 years of Ghaddafi.

Read it.

I guess ‘diversity’ is only a sham after all.

Read it.

Nassim Mimoune, 24, had already been expelled from the delivery room for branding the midwife a ‘rapist’ as she carried out an intimate examination of his wife.

Then through a window he spotted the nurse taking off his wife’s burqa as she prepared to give birth.

He smashed open the locked door and hit the woman in the face, demanding she replace the full Islamic face veil.

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

Freeberg lays out the telltale signs.

Things, usually things that are part of a cherished tradition, that some busybody with authority thinks need to go the way of the Dodo bird because they’re not secular enough in nature. My prongs are not part of any kind of test, they are observations. Observations which, from what I can tell, endure from one “War on Christmas” incident to the next…not a single one of the three ever falter or fail. There may be exceptions, somewhere, but I’m still waiting to find some.

Somehow, the atheist and the Buddhist and the Hindu and the Muslim are supposed to suffer some actual injury when they see a Nativity display on an Air Force base, like a slug writhing in agony beneath a salt shaker.

Read it.

Agriculture to produce wheat, rice and pulses requires clear-felling native vegetation. That act alone results in the deaths of thousands of Australian animals and plants per hectare. Since Europeans arrived on this continent we have lost more than half of Australia’s unique native vegetation, mostly to increase production of monocultures of introduced species for human consumption.

Most of Australia’s arable land is already in use. If more Australians want their nutritional needs to be met by plants, our arable land will need to be even more intensely farmed. This will require a net increase in the use of fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides and other threats to biodiversity and environmental health. Or, if existing laws are changed, more native vegetation could be cleared for agriculture (an area the size of Victoria plus Tasmania would be needed to produce the additional amount of plant-based food required).

Read it.

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

Once again, the Oxymoron Party manifests itself.

Read it.

And thus balance is restored to the universe.

Don’t know how the British tax system works, but in America he’d still owe income tax on the value of that car. Perhaps that till teach him to be more careful.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Once a break occurred, microcapsules with liquid metal filled the crack and restored 99 percent of conductivity in mere microseconds.

Read it.

You might as well read about it, since you’re paying for it.

Read it.

Scientists have found two Earth-sized planets orbiting a star outside the solar system, an encouraging sign for prospects of finding life elsewhere.

The discovery shows that such planets exist and that they can be detected by the Kepler spacecraft, said Francois Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. They’re the smallest planets found so far that orbit a star resembling our sun.

Read it.

An “irreplaceable” piece of public art created by one of Britain’s best known artists, Dame Barbara Hepworth, has been stolen by suspected metal thieves.

Looking at the picture, I’d class that as a public service.

Read it.

They claim the 3,000-year-old horse made from crushed white chalk in Uffington, Oxfordshire, was originally meant to be a depiction of the mythical horned beast.

The amateur historians have now received financial backing from ‘well-wishers’ including a £50,000 anonymous donation towards adding a 75-foot long horn to the horse.

The Uffington White Horse – which measures 374 feet – or 110 metres – is owned and managed by The National Trust – who have now received a proposal about the horn from the campaigners.

Read it.

Talk about First World problems….

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The crushing pressures and intense temperatures in Earth’s deep interior squeeze atoms and electrons so closely together that they interact very differently. With depth materials change. New experiments and supercomputer computations have revealed that iron oxide undergoes a new kind of transition under deep Earth conditions. Iron oxide, FeO, is a component of the second most abundant mineral at Earth’s lower mantle, ferropericlase.

Read it.

Interestingly enough, few Catholics these days go to confession either—the matter is considered scandalous.  So there’s all kinds of unresolved guilt that people have in modern America.  And how do they resolve it?

Well, there’s a new step in the evolution of indulgences.  Instead of doing penance for one’s sins, or paying for an indulgence for the same, we now, in our upper middle class SWPL segments, outsource the penance and payment for the indulgences instead to other groups that we don’t like or who compete with us for status.

So, instead of giving to the poor, we lobby for income redistribution away from other groups. Instead of living simply so others could simply live, we lobby to force other people to live more simply.  To expiate the perceived sins of racism, we lobby for Section 8 housing in OTHER people’s neighborhoods, and for the discrimination in terms of allocation of society’s goodies against OTHER people’s children.

Read it.

All civilizations go through strong and weak phases, and some of them fall. But no civilization in history exploded on a global scale within the space of a single century as modern Europe has done.

The European percentage of the world’s population has plummeted within the same period of time. Native Europeans are currently being displaced at a breathtaking pace in their own homelands, at least in the western half of the Continent. Western authorities and ruling elites are not very concerned about this fact, however. They are too busy worrying about carbon dioxide and what the weather will be like in the year 2089.

Perhaps the great upward expansion of European civilization that started in the 16th century and appeared to escape the long-standing human tradition of civilizations rising/flourishing/falling is about to come crashing down after all, once again demonstrating that what goes up must come down.

The worst part will be all the whining on the part of ‘progressives’ as the central tenet of their philosophy, that progress is inevitable, is refuted by Actual Events.

Read it.

The state’s unemployment rate fell 0.6 percent in November to 8.7 percent, according to new state reports, partly because the state’s employers opened up jobs to Americans after shedding illegal immigrants.

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

Read it.

Truly, this is a great time to be alive. And it will only get better.

Read it.

Scientists have discovered a new type of chemical bond thanks to the Abe and Ember supercomputers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This may be insanely nerdy for our web-loving readers, but for anyone investing in the future of technology, this is big. Not only because new chemical bonds mean new materials or products that could change the world, but because it shows exactly how supercomputers and big data are becoming the microscope of the future.

Freeberg is skeptical.

This is a constant in progressive rhetoric, I notice. Put the money where we tell you to put it…and, see, when you do that, [whoever gets it] is going to spend it, and that will invigorate the economy and create jobs. Wheeeee! Whereas, if the money was left with whoever had it in the first place, who knows what they’d do with it. Wipe their butts with it or something…

One rule of inference and prediction that has never let me down is: Everybody adapts, in some way, to everything. If consumers are feeling tight with their dollars, the businesses are going to anticipate a dwindling revenue stream and look for ways to cut expenses. If everybody picks up a certain amount of money being unemployed, then even valuable employees will be “parked” by the businesses — let go, told to re-apply, maybe we’ll re-hire you when things turn around again. If it actually works that way, then the employee has been converted into a sort of rental commodity. Rent the employees just like you’d rent a car: Define the need, pay for it as long as you need it, when you’re done return it to the state which is the actual owner of the “car.”

The government as a temp placement agency. I suppose there’s no shortage of people running around who think that’s how it’s actually supposed to work.

Lileks points out the unfortunate fact that this alleged Professor of Journalism probably couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag.

Even if you give him a pass on the prose, the opening paragraphs have done nothing but state the obvious, peeling back the withered skin of this wither fig to reveal the author’s alienation from the subject of his piece. He’s lived there for 20 years, but like a plant that sits in a pot on the ground, the roots somehow never made it into the soil. Apparently this makes him the ideal person to explain Iowa to the rest of the world through the pages of the Atlantic.

You suspect at the start that the piece exists to comfort the smart sets living on the coastal crusts: your assumptions of the lumpendorken wandering around the empty innards of the land, one hand scrabbling their goolies while the other digs for nose-gold, are pretty much correct.

Stephen Bloom is one of those sad people who pine for the corridors of academic power on one of the Blue Coasts but are stuck in Flyover Country because of the tedious requirement that one earn a living at something rather than being supported somehow by tax revenue so as to be able to spend one’s days Thinking Deep Thoughts rather than, you know, working. Perhaps out of some cruel whim, the Atlantic has (at last!) given him an opportunity to (a) demonstrate the deep hatred and contempt he holds for the state that has been paying him these last two decades and (b) demonstrate that they’ve not been getting much value for their money.

Them. Iowa is full of them.

Grocery AND clothing shopping at Wal-Mart! These maroons wouldn’t know what to do if you led them by the hand to Zabar’s or Armani’s and pressed a black Amex gently in their palms.

And Lileks mocks him as only Lileks can. Read the whole thing, as they say.

I repeat: Professor of Journalism. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?

It really does.

PIRACY is people with weapons boarding a ship at sea and stealing stuff, up to and including the ship, and possibly doing a mischief to the crew and/or passengers.

Ripping a DVD is not piracy.

Getting a movie through Bit Torrent is not piracy.

Passing around a scan of a book is not piracy.

IT’S ISN’T THEFT, EITHER. (Do You Hear Me, CongressMorons?)

THEFT is when you take something and the person from whom you took it NO LONGER HAS IT.

Making a copy is not theft. It Just Isn’t.

What it might be is COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT, which is a legally actionable offense, but NOT PIRACY and NOT THEFT.

<RANT>

One of the things that most vexes my spirit about modern life is the eagerness with which people, who want to gain some artificial advantage over their opponents by perverting the language, take words that have perfectly clear, consensually understood, and long-established words and use them like a porn starlet’s asshole, merely because it gives then a conversational stick with which to beat their enemies.

This is not ‘spin’, this is not ‘public relations’, this is not ‘controlling the narrative’, this is a VIOLATION OF ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL RULES OF HUMAN SOCIETY.

Stop it. Just stop it.

</RANT>

Megan McArdle, as she so often does, lays out some inconvenient truth.

A couple of days ago, I referred to the fact that poor people face some of the highest marginal tax rates in America. I received several emails from economics professors, gently correcting me: they face all the highest marginal tax rates in America. Because they lose benefits and tax credits, it can actually cost them money to get better jobs. That some of them take those better jobs anyway is a stunning testament to the power of character.

Read it.

That’s not how they would put it, of course, but that’s what it is.

Yes, retail bookstores, in what may be the single most backward thinking request of all time, are asking the general public (i.e. customers) to boycott Amazon due to the release of this phone app. For those too busy playing solitaire to really think this through, let me break this down for you. Amazon can offer goods at lower prices than many retail stores, they release an app that allows consumers to verify whether that’s the case on an individual product, the customer stands only to save money through this app, and retailers are asking customers to boycott the company saving them money over it. It’d be like boycotting a doctor for offering a cancer cure because, well, what about all the other doctors who have been making money offering chemo treatments?

Read it.

Chinese honey, once ubiquitous, was largely shut out of the American market through anti-dumping measures. So, this article from NPR.org alleges, it started to be sold through a third country (perhaps Indonesia, Thailand, or Malaysia) and was falsely labelled to evade the duties. (Apparently we know this because the honey can be tested for peculiar types of pollen.) The U.S. government wasn’t having any of thatof course, and so they held up suspicious shipments through regulations, inspections, and documentary requirements.  So now the Chinese honey is allegedly being sold through India.

The domestic honey industry is now starting to worry that all of this nefarious, subversive honey-related activity will suppress the market for all types of honey, including their own, and are starting a fair trade-esque system called True Source Honey, which will trace the honey to a proper, ‘merican source. None of that Chinese muck.

Like many other ‘progressive’ scare-words, ‘dumping’ is just a noise meaning ‘foreigners selling stuff for less than American producers want to sell it while keeping their previously fat profit.’ No consideration, of course, for those actually buying the honey, because they don’t have trade associations with expensive lobbyists to look after their interests. (You might think that, you know, elected representatives were there to look out for consumers, but that’s wrong, wrong, wrong; they only look out for the fictional consumers that ‘consumer advocacy’ groups tell them about.)

Read it.

A group of women have launched landmark court action against Britain’s biggest police force, claiming they were duped into forming long-term relationships with undercover policemen.

As Tom Clancy reputedly said, the difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to be credible.

Read it.

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And that seems appropriate somehow, even though it sounds like a newspaper headline from a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

The French always focus on the important things in life, after all.

Read it.

‘Braveheart Butter Bombs’ — coming to a state fair near you.

Read it.

Lawyers representing a non-profit Maryland group are suing a White Marsh paintball park for not letting them play.

Why? Because they’re blind.

Paintball is a visual sport. But it’s doubtful that’s what lawyers for Blind Industries and Services of Maryland, a non-profit whose stated “purpose is to positively change people’s attitudes about blindness,” were thinking when they filed the first-of-its-kind lawsuit against Route 40 Paintball Park in U.S. District Court.

Read it.

Just for fun, I compared the performance of the Times’ stock against some of the Wall Street banks that have been among the paper’s favorite whipping boys. The following numbers show common stock performance from December 2004 to the present:

Citigroup: -94.62%
Bank of America: -87.39%
New York Times: -81.45%
Morgan Stanley: -72.96%
Wells Fargo: -17.59
JP Morgan Chase: -17.12
Goldman Sachs: -11.67

An unbiased observer might wonder: why isn’t the CEO of the NY Times Company going to jail? Or why, in any event, is she leaving with a multi-million dollar payoff? If what happened on Wall Street was bad, why isn’t what happened in the newspaper industry worse?

Read it.

Do Tennessee fans take umbrage at such ribald putdowns? Of course they do — and that’s exactly my point. If promiscuity did not inspire an instinctive moral horror, then there would be no offense in saying that UT coeds put out like Pez dispensers.

Contrary to feminist dogma, the stigma attached to “sexually active women . . . who are not in monogamous relationships” isn’t a learned response inculcated by The Patriarchy, but rather a reflection of our innate sense that such behavior is contrary to the social good.

Piercings and tattoos are the ultimate Fashion Statement, representing a monumental commitment to a degree of narcissism that serves as the cornerstone of a deeply flawed character.

Read it.

We deal with the important stuff so you don’t have to.