Read it.

The free program, available for iPhones and Android smartphones, is both a primer to help motorists prepare for winter driving and a beacon when things go badly.

It can pinpoint a motorist’s location, call 911, notify friends and family, and monitor how long the car’s gas will hold out. The app also gives potentially life-saving alerts when users tap a big red button on its simple home screen that reads, “I’m Stranded!” Among the advice: stay with your vehicle and keep the tailpipe clear of snow, because a backup can cause carbon monoxide poisoning.

Read it.

Read it.

Yet another pointed reminder that freedom of religion is not a Muslim value.

Read it.

Assemblywoman Mary Hayashi (D-Hayward), who chairs the Committee on Business, Professions and Consumer Protection, has “pleaded no contest to charges that she tried to walk off with $2,500 in clothes.”

She merely tried to do retail what the rest of her Party is doing wholesale. Don’t break out of the herd, dear, or you’ll become a target.

“I am confident that with the close of these proceedings, she will continue to ably serve her constituents with the same talent and passion she has displayed throughout her time in office,” wrote Assembly Speaker John Pérez in a supportive statement.

Oh, I have no doubt….

Read it.

The increase in Afghans leaving for Europe fuels a lucrative business in fake passports and Taliban death threats.

Amazing how many people born there who would rather be here, as opposed to the trivial number of people born here who would rather be there.

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

Eric Raymond does some politics.

From a certain deeply cynical perspective the moguls’ outrage is sort of understandable. How dare Obama curry favor with Silicon Valley and the Wikipedians when he should have stayed bought? It’s not as though Obama actually cares about the “civil liberties” those damned anti-copyright anarchists are screaming about – anyone suffering from that delusion has forgotten that he signed the NDAA. So forget “principle”; from the moguls’ point of view this is a pure betrayal of the basest kind.

Surprise, surprise, surprise, as a certain pseudo-Marine would say.

Read it.

The White House apparently doesn’t like the association between Obama and food stamps; Jay Carney said that the claim that President Obama’s policies have added to the food stamp rolls is “crazy.”

But true, nevertheless. Check the graph and its supporting numbers.

Read it.

Earlier today an Islamic terror group in Norway posted a video on YouTube threatening the Prime Minister, the Crown Prince, and Norwegians in general with a violent, painful death. The video was linked by a leftist Facebook group set up to publicize Friday’s demonstration in front of Parliament against the war in Afghanistan.

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

Read it.

The bracelet identifies you to the building and allows it to follow you from room to room. Is the meeting room too cold? Press a button and it starts to warm up. It will also prepare rooms for your arrival, reading your patterns of movement over time. If it sounds creepy, it is.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Radio astronomer Dr. Venn described how he made the historic discovery after analysing a number of signals originating from the same point in space. “I realised the signal was in the VHF Band and slap bang in the middle of 41-68 MHz. It was obviously old terrestrial television broadcasts, but they seemed to be originating from deep space.” After boosting and digital enhancement the resulting video signals are remarkably clear.

Soon we will have a full set of Historical Documents.

A BBC team have been working closely with Dr Venn’s team to help recover the signals. BBC Television historian Peter Wells, explained “We now know these are original broadcasts. So far we have recovered about 7 weeks of old television signals from space. Every day in our lab is like traveling back in time. And speaking of which we have just started the digital recovery of signals that contain lost Doctor Who episodes.

And that, after all, is the important part….

Freeberg brings up some inconvenient truth.

This blog, which nobody reads anyway, has frequently made the point about GoodPerson Fever; we’ve got all these ninnies just like Juan Williams, running around everywhere, and even worse still they are disproportionately represented in the hallways of power. Every decision made has to be absolutely non-offensive, and that includes the decisions of others, about matters well outside of their purview, and so they end up excoriating strangers for violating the Could Be Construed As standard. In other words, they get offended on behalf of other people, people who exist only in theory and might very well not exist at all in reality.

It’s all an outgrowth of the ‘progressive’ compulsion (which appears to be congenital) to stick their noses into other people’s business given the slightest excuse — or even no excuse at all.

Read it.

At the end of last year, the Argentinian President ordered the creation of a new, centralized, nationwide biometric ID database for law enforcement purposes, known as SIBIOS. A decree from the beginning of this year allows 14 million digitized fingerprints, gathered as part of Argentina’s national ID system, to be added to SIBIOS.

And Argentina is such a poster child for democracy, too….

Read it.

Europe slowly commits suicide — and we get to watch.

Read it.

A new online game in India called “Angry Brides” which seeks to highlight the problem of illegal dowry demands for women has attracted more than 270,000 fans.

Read it.

The Kennedys still won’t allow it off Cape Cod.

Read it.

The guy is apparently famous for owning just 15 things.

In the old days, they called such people ‘bums’. But times change.

Steve Sailer spanks some sloppy thinkers.

The New York Times ran an article over the weekend on how the government’s racial categories don’t fit Hispanics well: For Many Latinos Racial Identity Is More Culture than Color. It’s like a dumbed-down version of one of my articles.

The general tone of the article is the usual: that Latino political power through ethnocentric solidarity is an unquestioned good. To newspaper reporters, what could be more self-evident? All the Latino leaders in their Blackberries tell them that. Granted, in the real world, not that many Spanish-surnamed people seem to care all that much, but that’s just proof that we need to write even more articles telling the Latino masses to Get With The Program that their leaders have laid out for them. (If only we could get Latinos to read the Times instead of the Post.) These people who return my phone calls so promptly are the Martin Luther Kings of the 21st Century. If you don’t believe me, just ask them.

Read it.

A world-renowned American base-jumper known as “The Birdman” broke both legs when he crashed into the face of South Africa’s Table Mountain moments after leaping off its flat summit.

Stupid is as stupid does.

Read it.

Professional do-gooder Kerry Kennedy — Gov. Cuomo’s ex-wife and the daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy — has called the oil-drilled rain forests of Ecuador “the biggest corporate environmental disaster on the face of the Earth, in the history of the world.”

The human-rights activist penned opinion pieces and lobbied officials to voice her outrage at the damage oil companies have caused to the town of Lago Agrio, where 1,700 square miles of rain forest have been destroyed and people sickened.

What Kennedy has never mentioned during her campaign is that she is being paid handsomely for her seemingly selfless advocacy.

Kennedy, 52, was secretly hired as a “public-relations consultant” by the lawyer representing the Ecuadoreans in an $18 billion lawsuit against Chevron, according to court documents.

Cashing in on her respected family name and legacy, Kennedy raked in tens of thousands of dollars and was given a 0.25 percent stake — worth as much as $40 million — if the $18 billion judgment handed down by an Ecuadorean judge is ultimately upheld. (Chevron has not yet paid pending its countersuit in Manhattan federal court.)

Doing well by doing good. Actually, it’s refreshing to learn that there’s a Kennedy who isn’t a gratuitously buttinsky do-gooder asshole, but is actually working for money like the rest of us.

Read it.

Reactions by the cleaning agents, known as Criegee intermediates, are also emitting a by-product that forms solar radiation-reflecting clouds that could help cool Earth and reduce the effects of global warming.

The Criegee biradicals were first hypothesised in the 1950s by German chemist Rudolf Criegee, but only now have they been recreated in a lab and directly measured for the first time. Specifically, the scientists took formaldehyde oxide – a species of Creigee intermediate – and observed it reacting with sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.

These dioxides are said to initiate climate change in our atmosphere, yet it’s now understood they are removed from the troposphere by helpful Criegee biradicals – described as pivotal atmospheric reactants. The reaction also spews sulphate and nitrate into the atmosphere, creating aerosol droplets that seed planet-cooling clouds.

Read it.

Researchers in the United States and Great Britain have made a significant breakthrough in deciphering dolphin language in which a series of eight objects have been sonically identified by dolphins. Team leader, Jack Kassewitz of SpeakDolphin.com, ‘spoke’ to dolphins with the dolphin’s own sound picture words. Dolphins in two separate research centers understood the words, presenting convincing evidence that dolphins employ a universal “sono-pictorial” language of communication.

Read it.

Jesse Roe, a ninth-grade math teacher at a charter school here called Summit, has a peephole into the brains of each of his 38 students.

He can see that a girl sitting against the wall is zipping through geometry exercises; that a boy with long curls over his eyes is stuck on a lesson on long equations; and that another boy in the front row is getting a handle on probability.

Each student’s math journey shows up instantly on the laptop Mr. Roe carries as he wanders the room. He stops at each desk, cajoles, offers tips, reassures. For an hour, this crowded, dimly lighted classroom in the hardscrabble shadow of Silicon Valley hums with the sound of fingers clicking on keyboards, pencils scratching on paper and an occasional whoop when a student scores a streak of right answers.

The future is here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.

Now: Imagine trying to get this system into a school infected with a teacher’s union. Feel free to scream and kick the wall if it will make you feel better.

Mr. Khan’s critics say that his model is really a return to rote learning under a high-tech facade, and that it would be far better to help children puzzle through a concept than drill it into their heads.

Better for who? Better for the kids on the right side of the bell curve, perhaps, but that’s only a small subsection of those who need to be taught. This is not Lake Woebegone, and all of the children are not above average.

Read it.

The widespread assumption is that few Americans speak more than one language, compared with citizens of other nations — and that we have little interest in learning to speak another. But is this true?

Probably not. I speak only one language regularly, but then that’s all I really need … living in Texas notwithstanding, I can get along perfectly well not doing Spanish. On the other hand, I can make my way in Latin, French, German, Russian, and Greek (thanks to going to non-government schools) and know enough of Irish, Arabic, Swahili, and Japanese to appreciate their unique qualities. (And how many nerds know enough Elvish or Klingon to astound their high school teachers?) If I lived in Europe or Africa, where one has the equivalent of, say, living in Indiana and having Michigan, Illinois, Kentucky, and Ohio speaking different languages (let’s not have any snide remarks about Kentucky, please), then I’m sure I’d be sufficiently multilingual to suite the most rabid Crustian. But that’s not the case.

Indeed, I’d say that most black people in the U.S. are effectively bilingual, since there’s a distinctive black dialect (remember the ‘ebonics’ flap?) that, depending on how deep into the inner city you get, is often not intelligible to people from the suburbs. (In nine times out of ten, you can tell whether someone is black simply by the way they speak — indeed, one black writer, detailing his experiences growing up and attempting to fit into mainstream American culture, titled his book He Talk Like a White Boy after a remark by one of his classmates.)

Since 1980, the United States Census Bureau has asked: “Does this person speak a language other than English at home? What is this language? How well does this person speak English?” The bureau reports that as of 2009, about 20 percent of Americans speak a language other than English at home. This figure is often taken to indicate the number of bilingual speakers in the United States.

But a moment’s reflection reveals that the bureau’s question about what you speak at home is not equivalent to asking whether you speak more than one language. I have some proficiency in Spanish and was fluent in Mandarin 20 years ago. But when the American Community Survey (an ongoing survey from the Census Bureau) arrived in my mailbox last month, posing that question, I had to answer no, because we speak only English in my home.

So basically the bean-counters are looking for unassimilated immigrants, which is not the same thing at all.

Nonetheless, to better map American language abilities, the census should ask the same question that the European Commission asked in its survey in 2006: Can you have a conversation in a language besides your mother tongue? (The answer, incidentally, dented Europe’s reputation as highly multilingual: only 56 percent of the respondents, who tended to be younger and more educated, said they could.)

And we have proof.

Read it.

As the biggest kid on the e-commerce block, Amazon now advocates the federal government forcing all online merchants to collect sales taxes on every sale.

Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president for global public policy, said at a news conference in the governor’s office that the company supported federal legislation requiring all sales tax collections by all online companies.

“It’s the only way to level the playing field for all sellers,” Misener said. “It’s the only way for Indiana to obtain all the sales tax revenue that is already owed.”

Except that it doesn’t, of course, any more than making an Abrams tank and a Smart For Two drive in the same six feet of snow ‘levels the playing field’. The cost of compliance for ‘all online companies’ is pocket change for an entity like Amazon, but could kill most smaller vendors — which Amazon, in classic crapitalism fashion, is trying to stifle before they get out of the crib and become competitors. Bezos is a sellout, after all. How disappointing.

Heh.

Read it.

“My students never knew I normally vote Republican,” Ms. Davis said Thursday at a campaign stop in Orangeburg for Texas Gov. Rick Perry. As a teacher of third, fourth and fifth graders, “I couldn’t put a yard sign out — the kids knew where I lived,” she said. “Now I have the opportunity to go out and speak my mind.”

The lesson being that NO DEMOCRAT TEACHER EVER HAS OR EVER WILL SHOW SUCH RESTRAINT.

Read it.

Its crew immediately returned fire, forcing the pirates off the hull and back into their skiff, where they dumped their weapons overboard and attempted to escape.

Really, you have to wonder about some of these folks.

Read it. And ponder the poster.

Read it.

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

The Oatmeal is watching.

Addendum: DO NOT CONFUSE ‘IF’ WITH ‘WHETHER’ (unless you have tattoos or piercings, in which case you are doomed to life in the Underclass anyway and it doesn’t matter whether you can use the language properly). (Note the correct use of ‘whether’ rather than ‘if’.)

‘IF’ is conditional. ‘I want to know if you are going.’ =>’You’re going: I want to know; you’re not going: I don’t care.’

When you want to know regardless, use ‘whether’: ‘I want to know whether you are going.’ => ‘Go or stay, I still want to know.’

Read it.

The accident was caught on video and Ms Langworthy is seen hitting the water with her feet still tied before being swept towards rapids on the river, which separates Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Will she take the hint? Only time will tell. (Gotta love Australians, but, I mean, damn….)

Darwin Award! Getcher Darwin Award here….

Read it.

Don’t know what ‘neurotypical’ means? Well, read the essay.

Read it.

Or not.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, reflects on kindness in action.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith of Bristol, England have ten kids but only a four-bedroom house. Things are cramped. They are also hard-up: Mrs. Smith tells us that the children have only one Nintendo Wii console between them. If that’s got you reaching for your hanky, please note that neither of the Smiths has held a job since 2001, when the child count was three. They live entirely on government benefits, north of $150,000 worth per annum. The town gave them the house and also delivers breakfast to them.

I’d certainly like that non-job.

I just got back from a lecture by Don Barnett, an expert on the topic. Don ran through points he’s made in his Center for Immigration Studies research papers.

Bottom line: Refugee resettlement is a huge money racket, with executives of the VOLAGs (Voluntary Agencies) drawing extravagant salaries that are mostly paid by the US taxpayer. Government money has well-nigh chased out private charity. The United Nations drives the process, the State Department waving refugees through to the VOLAGS, who after a few weeks dump them on the welfare systems. (Refugees are immediately eligible for all welfare benefits.) Claims of refugee status are checked perfunctorily or not at all, so that a high proportion—Barnett thinks 90 percent—are bogus.

Your tax dollars at work. Or not, as it may be.

Romney: “I’m not really a Republican, I just play one on TV.”

Gingrich: “I have more bad ideas in a day than you have ideas at all. Don’t you eyeball me!”

Perry: “Heard you were having an election, so I thought I’d drop by.”

Santorum: “I’m the conservative your mother warned you about.”

Paul: “Arf! Arf arf arf! Arf arf! Arf”

Huntsman: “You can just call me Joe Cool. Did you know that I speak Chinese?”

Read it.

Gotta love Australians.

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A pointed reminder that toleration for non-Muslim lifestyles is not a Muslim value.

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

Read it.

Back in 2007, Congress created a biofuels mandate under which oil companies are required to use a minimum amount of cellulosic ethanol each year.  The mandate was supposed to encourage the development of a domestic cellulosic ethanol industry.  This has not happened.  Several years after the mandate was imposed, there is still no commercial cellulosic ethanol production.  This gets the oil companies off the hook, right?  Nope.  As the New York Times reports, companies are still paying fines, totaling nearly $7 million, for failing to meet a blending quota for a substance that does not exist.  Were that not bad enough, this year the cellulosic ethanol quota will increase, as will the fines for failing to meet it.

Of course. That makes perfect sense, to a bureaucrat. The important thing is not that people comply with the law, but that people not comply with the law, and cough up a ransom for not doing so.

As Green notes, Congress might as well have mandated oil companies blend gasoline with rainbows and unicorn sweat.

That’s phase 2, if Obama gets re-elected.

Read it.

“Good” is very much a sliding scale when you’re a government agency that combines the incompetent brusqueness of classic security theater with the thoroughness of an overenthusiastic gynecological exam.

So, what sort of “epic gets” made the TSA’s list? Well, there’s a variety of weapons, ranging from normal loaded handguns in carry-on bags to something called a “Tactical Spike” to throwing knives to a taser disguised as a cellphone. There’s also a science project, some wildlife, inert landmines, some chunks of C4 explosive and a flare gun. There’s a lot of items that sound dangerous, but Bruce Schneier points out what’s missing from the TSA’s collection:

That’s right; not a single terrorist on the list. Mostly forgetful, and entirely innocent, people. Note that they fail to point out that the firearms and knives would have been just as easily caught by pre-9/11 screening procedures. And that the C4 — their #1 “good catch” — was on the return flight; they missed it the first time. So only 1 for 2 on that one.

Read it.

Virtually all our energy exports go to the US.   As a country, we must seek new markets for our products and services and the booming Asia-Pacific economies have shown great interest in our oil, gas, metals and minerals. For our government, the choice is clear:  we need to diversify our markets in order to create jobs and economic growth for Canadians across this country.  We must expand our trade with the fast growing Asian economies. We know that increasing trade will help ensure the financial security of Canadians and their families.

Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade.  Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry.  No mining.  No oil.  No gas. No more hydro-electric dams.

Pretty blunt, for an elected official. Would that the U.S. had a few such. He rips the Clever Plastic Disguise off of the regressives who would cancel anything that happened after 1900.

These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.  They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects.  They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest. They attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources.  Finally, if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach:  sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further. They do this because they know it can work.  It works because it helps them to achieve their ultimate objective: delay a project to the point it becomes economically unviable.

And that’s the sad part.

Read it.

Medical scientists in San Francisco have sent a chill wind blowing through the IT industry as they issue a call for swingeing taxes on “soda, fruit punch, sweet tea, sports drinks, and other sweetened beverages”.

A collection of health profs and other researchers led by Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo (associate professor of medicine and of epidemiology and biostatistics at California uni’s San Francisco campus) say they have now put numbers on the horrific toll exacted as Americans poison themselves with no less than 13.8 billion gallons* of disgustful pop annually. Furthermore they say that huge numbers of lives would be saved if only the government would slap a hefty tax on the sugar-laden beverages of death – to the tune of a cent per fluid ounce.

I’d like to call for a law requiring all professors who call for taxes on other people for lifestyle choices to wear brown shirts and KGB armbands.

Steve Sailer does the heavy lifting.

The conventional wisdom on increasing minority homeownership, as promoted by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Henry Cisneros, and Angelo Mozilo, was that mortgage lenders who followed traditional credit standards were stupid racists who were overlooking lots of blacks and Hispanics who were smart enough to make enough money to pay off their mortgages even if they put down a tiny or nonexistent down payment and didn’t quite have all their documents. (Hey, they’re undocumented! Don’t be prejudiced against the undocumented for not having documents proving that that they make six figures picking strawberries.)

What happened instead, of course, was that sharp pencil guys, in the name of fighting racist redlining, pushed people who weren’t good with numbers and weren’t good at coolly assessing the long term implications of financial decisions, people who were disproportionately blacks and Hispanics, into complicated loans that just raped them, and ended up raping the country.

But hey! Now they’re victims, and if there’s anything the Crust can’t get enough of, it’s victims. Victims give them the opportunity to spend money, most of which goes into their own pockets. Victims justify setting up government programs, the primary purpose of which is to hire and pay government workers (using the term loosely).

And that explains a lot about the motivations behind the businesses in the immigration lobby: more uneducated, innumerate, insecure Mexicans are more fresh meat for their salesmen. They can’t rip off educated white people who subscribe to Consumer Reporters and use the Zag system reserved for CR subscribers, so they want to bring in millions of new people they can outsmart and cheat.

Read it.

So-called “cottage foods” laws are popping up around the country in response to the growing demand for local foods on the part of buyers and sellers. Generally, these laws help the entrepreneurs behind small startup ventures operated out of the home opt out of the crushing regulations faced by restaurants and other food sellers. But in spite of the good intentions behind the laws, they sometimes merely create a parallel system of numbingly stupid regulations.

Once again, it wouldn’t be a problem absent the government.

Read it.

Sorry if this comes as a shock.

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Preserved in Antarctica since 1907, the Scotch that Ernest Shackleton drank is now available in stores

Read it.

I guess the ‘alternative’ in ‘Alternative Energy’ means ‘an alternative to cheap and reliable’.

Bob nails it.

BATHROOMS

A man has six items in his bathroom: toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving cream, razor, soap, and a towel.

The average number of items in a woman’s bathroom is 173. A man would not be able to identify more than about a dozen of these items.

WARDROBE

A woman will dress up to go shopping, empty the trash, answer the phone, read a book, or get the mail.

A man will dress up (grudgingly) for weddings and funerals.

Read it.

Over at Big Goverment, Schweizer talks about how green energy tycoon Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has gotten his knickers in a twist over claims that his “politically-connected solar company called Brightsource (of which Mr. Kennedy’s firm is the largest investor) landed a sweetheart billion-dollar plus taxpayer-guaranteed loan.” RFKjr calls Schweizer a “sock puppet” for “Big Oil.”

Read it.

I was delighted to discover that I hadn’t seen any of these.