Read it.

Brademeyer and her two chldren flew to Wichita, Kansas, the weekend before last for her brother’s wedding. On the way back to Missoula, they shared a flight to Denver with Brademeyer’s mother, who lives in California. Brademeyer and her kids, ages 4 and 6, passed through the metal detector without incident, but her mother made the machine beep. Unable to determine what had triggered the alarm, a transportation security officer informed her that she would have to wait for a pat-down. At that point, Brademeyer reports on her Facebook page, her 4-year-old daughter, Isabella, noticed her grandmother and excitedly ran back through the checkpoint to hug her. “They made very brief contact,” Brademeyer says, “no longer than a few seconds.”

Brademeyer says the TSOs at the checkpoint reacted to this breach of protocol by screaming at Isabella, telling her she would have to undergo a pat-down as well. They darkly suggested that her grandmother might have passed a gun to her during their brief embrace, even though Isabella was not carrying anything or wearing any clothing with pockets. They refused to let her go back through the metal detector, insisting that she be frisked. Isabella began crying and ran away from the TSOs, enraging them further. They threatened to close down the airport in light of the “high security threat” posed by the terrified little girl. Although they at first insisted that Brademeyer keep her distance from Isabella, they eventually let her follow her daughter into a separate room for the pat-down. To the dismay of the TSO doing the groping, Isabella would not stop crying even when commanded to do so.

A President who wasn’t owned by the public employees’ unions would personally fire these assholes, much as Reagan fired the illegally striking air traffic controllers.

Read it.

Jones College Prep, a Chicago Public Schools “selective enrollment” school, held “Social Justice Week” in March, a collection of events geared towards turning students into activists.

Your tax dollars at work.

Read it.

Environmental luminary Dr James Lovelock says he now regrets being “alarmist” about climate predictions.

Speaking to MSNBC, Lovelock admitted spicing up his books with headline-catching doomsday predictions.

In 2006 Dr Lovelock predicted the Earth “would catch a morbid fever” that would destroy six billion people – “the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable,” he predicted. In 2009, he was telling the Guardian that “we may face planet-wide devastation worse even than unrestricted nuclear war between superpowers”.

“I made a mistake,” the 92-year-old scientist now says.

Read it.

Is your office less like a workplace and more like a battlefield? Head into the day prepared with the Bolt Action Tactical Pen ($50). Built from anodized milled aluminum, it features a bolt action mechanism that opens and closes the pen tip, an integrated clip, and a flat head in case all the goofing around becomes an actual, “I need to stab someone in the eye” battle.

For all your merc-wannabe needs.

Read it.

Fusion occurs when plasmas become hot and dense enough for the atomic nuclei contained within the hot gas to combine and release energy. But when the plasmas in experimental reactors called tokamaks reach the mysterious density limit, they can spiral apart into a flash of light. “The big mystery is why adding more heating power to the plasma doesn’t get you to higher density,” said David A. Gates, a principal research physicist at PPPL and co-author of the proposed solution with Luis Delgado-Aparicio, a post-doctoral fellow at PPPL and a visiting scientist at MIT’s Plasma Science Fusion Center. “This is critical because density is the key parameter in reaching fusion and people have been puzzling about this for 30 or 40 years.”

The scientists hit upon their theory in what Gates called “a 10-minute ‘Aha!’ moment.” Working out equations on a whiteboard in Gates’ office, the physicists focused on the islands and the impurities that drive away energy. The impurities stem from particles that the plasma kicks up from the tokamak wall. “When you hit this magical density limit, the islands grow and coalesce and the plasma ends up in a disruption,” says Delgado-Aparacio.

Read it.

C is for Civility:
Just keep your opinions to yourself and I won’t have to hurt you. Much.

D is for Democrat:
My friends and I are the 99%. Everyone else is the 1%… Math? What math?

E is for EPA:
Stop. ALL. human. activity. right. now. [Evil People Activity?]

R is for Reform:
What to call an unnatural government act that destroys something useful.

U is for Unions:
We know where you live.

Read it.

According to police, Owens fussed at some kids playing basketball in the middle of Delmar Drive about 8:30 Saturday night. They say the kids left and a group of adults returned, armed with everything but the kitchen sink.

Police tell News 5 the suspects used chairs, pipes and paint cans to beat Owens.

Owens’ sister, Ashley Parker, saw the attack. “It was the scariest thing I have ever witnessed.” Parker says 20 people, all African American, attacked her brother on the front porch of his home, using “brass buckles, paint cans and anything they could get their hands on.”

Damn those racist white people! Oh, wait….

What Parker says happened next could make the fallout from the brutal beating even worse. As the attackers walked away, leaving Owen bleeding on the ground, Parker says one of them said “Now thats justice for Trayvon.” Trayvon Martin is the unarmed teenager police say was shot and killed February 26 by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman in Samford, Florida.

And there’s identity politics for you, red in tooth and claw.

Read it.

Last summer, as part of the agreement that resulted in raising the federal government’s debt limit, Congress passed the Budget Control Act, which set spending caps for future years. These spending caps represented “cuts” in the Washington sense; that is, spending was allowed to increase, but not as fast as might otherwise have been projected. When it has suited their purposes, the Democrats have been champions of the Budget Control Act. Thus when House Republicans adopted a budget that would have spent less than the maximums under the BCA, Democrats alleged that the budget “violated” the Act. They thus turned the Budget Control Act on its head, pretending that the maximum spending levels agreed on in the Act–caps–were actually minimums.

Read it.

Fascist behavior is not limited to the blue states.

Read it.

Until you see it gathered in one place like this, it’s often difficult to remember the number of ways in which Cynthia McKinney is cracked. And she always looks like a muppet caricature, which certainly doesn’t help.

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

A continuing question here at iSteve is whether media-proclaimed ethnic leaders actually have many followers. For example, there is little evidence that that the well-funded “Latino leaders” who get quoted in English-language newspaper articles actually have many followers. A Pew survey asked Hispanics who the most important Hispanic leader is, and 74% said Don’t Know or There Isn’t One. The déformation professionnelle of these synthetic Hispanic hierarchs constantly cited in the Washington Post and the New York Times claiming that the vast numbers of voters who are their followers want, above all else, more immigration is that they have their jobs only because white people with money and power look at the Census data and figure they need to get on the good side of the coming tidal wave. Not surprisingly, these spokesmodels argue, in turn, for an even bigger tidal wave to make them even more employable in the ethnic leadership racket.

The available evidence suggests that the followers of most ‘ethnic leaders’ are overwhelmingly white.

Read it.

Reading through the numerous articles about “pink slime” alongside articles about general meat consumption published conspicuously close to the “pink slime” controversy, one can only come to the conclusion that the hysteria over “pink slime” was ginned up to make consumers focus on meat production.

Ya think?

The Food Elite doesn’t just want to ban “pink slime.” They don’t want to curtail only red meat consumption. The Food Elite wants to curb the consumption of all meat. There is an explanation for why the Food Elite wants us all to consume less meat, but that’s a discussion for another day. For now, it’s enough to focus on the fact that the Food Elite doesn’t want us eating meat.

As indeed they don’t.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Kazakhstan’s foreign minister says the fictional Borat character has been good for tourism, increasing the number of visas to the ex-Soviet state by ten times.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

Michael Barone calls out the regressives of the Left.

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen liberal commentators look back with nostalgia to the days when a young man fresh out of high school or military service could get a well-paying job on an assembly line at a unionized auto factory that could carry him to a comfortable retirement.

As it happens, I grew up in Detroit and for a time lived next door to factory workers, so I know something that has eluded the liberal nostalgiacs — which is that people hated those jobs. Assembly-line work was boring and repetitive. Management had imbibed Frederick W. Taylor’s theories that workers were stupid and couldn’t be trusted with any initiative.

No worry about anybody in Detroit actually working any more, of course.

Read it.

“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
“They are merely conventional signs!

One must, after all, have priorities. John Henry Newman once wrote about The Idea of a University but obviously he was never in Tuscaloosa on Game Day.

Read it.

Tell the truth: Haven’t we all wanted to do that?

Read it.

As it so happens, I agree.

In fact, aside from Margaret Thatcher, the ‘Conservatives’ haven’t had a Right Wing Person lead their party since Churchill, and he was kind of borderline.

Makes you wonder what exactly they’re thinking over there.

Seemed pretty obvious at the time.

What would happen to Germany if the Nazis were to rule? That was a question that had a surprisingly easy answer. In the March issue of The Atlantic, Nicolas Fairweather wrote “Hitler and Hitlerism: A Man of Destiny.” In it, he analyzed Hitler and his philosophy, as derived from a reading of Mein Kampf, “to foreshadow, from [Hitler’s] own statements, some of the things he would like to accomplish.” Journalists, at times, can be horrible predictors of the future. But in this case, Fairweather’s assessment was a sound alarm.

4. His concern for social betterment (‘true Socialism’) as a necessary prerequisite to the acceptance of his ideals by the masses.

Joel Kotkin lays out some inconvenient truth.

Mr. Kotkin, one of the nation’s premier demographers, left his native New York City in 1971 to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley. The state was a far-out paradise for hipsters who had grown up listening to the Mamas & the Papas’ iconic “California Dreamin'” and the Beach Boys’ “California Girls.” But it also attracted young, ambitious people “who had a lot of dreams, wanted to build big companies.” Think Intel, Apple and Hewlett-Packard.

Now, however, the Golden State’s fastest-growing entity is government and its biggest product is red tape. The first thing that comes to many American minds when you mention California isn’t Hollywood or tanned girls on a beach, but Greece. Many progressives in California take that as a compliment since Greeks are ostensibly happier. But as Mr. Kotkin notes, Californians are increasingly pursuing happiness elsewhere.

Read it.

For example, c-Jump — a board game that teaches the basics of programming. Some of the spaces you’ll land on in the course of your journey down the mountain include “goto jump;” and “switch (x) {“. Then there’s CPU Wars, for the three people out there that think Magic: The Gathering is too mainstream.

Read it.

Except for the ones who refuse to grow up, of course, which is becoming a greater and greater percentage as the world spins down into lunacy.

An important clue that middle age isn’t just the start of a downward spiral is that it does not bear the hallmarks of general, passive decline. Most body systems deteriorate very little during this stage of life. Those that do, deteriorate in ways that are very distinctive, are rarely seen in other species and are often abrupt.

For example, our ability to focus on nearby objects declines in a predictable way: Farsightedness is rare at 35 but universal at 50. Skin elasticity also decreases reliably and often surprisingly abruptly in early middle age. Patterns of fat deposition change in predictable, stereotyped ways. Other systems, notably cognition, barely change.

Each of these changes can be explained in evolutionary terms. In general, it makes sense to invest in the repair and maintenance only of body systems that deliver an immediate fitness benefit — that is, those that help to propagate your genes. As people get older, they no longer need spectacular visual acuity or mate-attracting, unblemished skin. Yet they do need their brains, and that is why we still invest heavily in them during middle age.

Read it.

While politicians and pundits natter on about whether or not Americans are paying our “fair share” of the national protection money forked over to that extortion racket known as government, it’s worth noting that, whatever you may think of how the tax code allocates the pain, Americans are notable for paying what they’re told to pay. When comparing personal income tax compliance rates gleaned from studies carefully hand-crafted by international craftsman-researchers, taxpayers in the U.S.A. are notable for their unequalled willingness to reach deep into their pockets and hand the taxman what he says they owe.

Read it.

Why are so many tattooed British youths blithely unconcerned about whether they are appealing to potential employers?

Because they don’t have to be. No job? No problem! The government’s welfare system has your back — and your stomach, and your roof, and your transportation, and your beer and video games if you work the system correctly. Vote for the left, and the benefits keep piling up.

Freeberg has created a useful new word, as is his wont.

Real science knows what has been demonstrated after the research is done. Red-dot science knows what has been proven, after, during, and before this research; the research itself is little more than a tangent. Most people with normal working brains, very often have at least the unsettling suspicion they’re looking at such a false brand of science when they read about studies that say, for example, “women suffer more than men do” or “girls are much more advanced in [blank] than boys” or anything of the form “World To End, Women & Minorities Hardest Hit.” Any story about a study that begins “Researchers wondered what would happen if…” inspires thoughts, although it isn’t mentioned much, of wonder about the wondering by the researchers. Wait, what kind of “researchers” would wonder about that? Intellectually-capable, non-agenda-driven people read things like that and think — waitaminnit, was this open to question or was it not? If it was not open to question, why did the money get spent on the study? And if it is indeed questionable and therefore there must be difficulty in measuring it, then how come there never, ever seem to be any “outlier” studies, even ones that are subsequently discredited, that suggest something contrary? Even through error? Like, ever?

And, of course, it wouldn’t be science without a cat.

Read it.

If the goal of the Americans with Disabilities Act was to, uh, disable much of America, it’s an unmatched success.

Indeed, there seems no end to the realms of American life in which this 1990 law inflicts pain, particularly in New York.

This week, The New York Times highlighted one such area: small businesses that are harassed — essentially, shaken down — by lawyers fishing for violations.

It’s a goldmine, of course, for the lawyers who “flood” businesses with lawsuits, ostensibly on behalf of disabled clients they recruit from advocacy groups.

Read it.

Hamas’ deputy politburo chief and former U.S. Muslim Brotherhood branch leader told The Forward this week that his group would view any agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority as more of a hudna—or cease-fire—than a peace treaty in the conventional sense of the word.

As in conflicts with the Mafia, there is no peace with Islam — merely temporary cease-fires until they think they are strong enough to strike up the war again. That’s why Muslims call the non-Muslim world the Dar al-Harb, the ‘House of War’. It’s all there in the literature.

Read it.

We reported last week on the proposal by an Islamic fundamentalist in Germany to distribute 25 million free German-language Korans to the non-Muslim populace.

Imagine that you’re one of the unwitting recipients of a free Koran, dropped with a clunk through your letter box early one morning. You take a quick look at the book. It’s boring, turgid, and incomprehensible. You don’t want it.

But how should you dispose of it? You’ve heard on the news about what happens to non-Muslims who burn the Koran, or throw it in the garbage, or flush it down the toilet. You don’t want to share their fate.

So what’s the solution? Bury it in the back yard? Hand it over to the police?

Use it to wipe your ass? The choices are endless.

Read it. And watch the video.

Last month Altaeros Energies demonstrated its Airborne Wind Turbine, a 35-foot-wide blimp that could carry a turbine hundreds of feet into the air in order to harness stronger winds. While we had heard about the achievement, the company has now released a video showing the AWT in action. The clip shows the turbine blimp being tested 350 feet in the air, where it managed to generate twice the amount of power as a land-based turbine and then transfer it back to the ground through special tethers. It’s impressive to watch, but the company has even bigger plans for the AWT — eventually it’s expected to reach heights of over 1,000 feet.

And if these are widely deployed, how long before some stupidly-piloted aircraft or helicopter flies into the tethers and crashes? Nobody thinks things through any more.

Read it.

In a post-industrial era, the correlation between population and military power is sharply reduced. Examples of this transformation abound. Very small countries like Israel and Singapore field military forces far more powerful than their populations would suggest and provide security for themselves in regions with far larger neighbors. Last summer, Special Forces soldiers from the tiny nation of Qatar led the boots-on-the-ground unconventional warfare campaign inside comparatively massive Libya that brought down Muammar al-Qaddafi. Among non-state actors, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon has the military organization and enough sophisticated weapons to rival many states in the region. Mexico’s Sinaloa and Los Zetas drug cartels have the resources and structure to merit consideration as small but troublesome quasi-military organizations.

The falling costs and increased dispersion of militarily useful technology has lowered the barriers for organizations, be they nation-states or non-state actors, to become dangerous military threats. For such potential military powers, acquiring warehouses of small arms, munitions, and equipment is merely an afterthought. Anti-aircraft and anti-ship guided missiles, once only for major military powers, are now available for sale or fabrication from commercial components. The dispersion and cheap access to technology applies not only to munitions but also to supporting components such as optics, night vision sensors, communications and navigation devices, and electronic warfare equipment — areas where the Pentagon has invested enormous sums over past decades. The advantages U.S. forces formerly gained from those investments are now fleeting, a consequence of the falling costs and increased dispersion of such technology.

Read it.

Political activism has drawn the University of California into an academic death spiral. Too many professors believe their job is to “advance social justice” rather than teach the subject they were hired to teach. Groupthink has replaced lively debate. Institutions that were designed to stir intellectual curiosity aren’t challenging young minds. They’re churning out “ignorance.” So argues a new report, “A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California,” from the conservative California Association of Scholars.

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

In 2004, for example, researchers examined the voter registration of UC Berkeley faculty. They found a ratio of 8 Democrats for each Republican. While the ratio was 4:1 in the professional schools, in more political disciplines, the ratio rose to 17:1 in the humanities and 21:1 in social sciences.

Be careful not to step in the diversity.

Read it.

English fantasy writer Terry Pratchett is totally awesome. After the best-selling novelist (65 million books sold worldwide) was knighted by the Queen, he made his own sword to go along with his other nightly accoutrement.

Not satisfied with just having a blacksmith make a custom piece, Pratchett actually went out into a field and dug up raw iron ore which he smelt into steel using a homemade kiln powered by sheep poop in his backyard. For an extra shot of magic he threw in a few pieces of meterorite.

Pratchett left the final metal work to a blacksmith, who forged it into a blade fit for a knight.

That’s pretty cool.

Sadly he has to keep his sword in a secret location because strict British knife laws make no distinction for knights’ swords and he fears its confiscation.

There’s room for you in Texas, Sir Terry, and you can even keep your sword.

Fred mentions the unmentionable.

The Coming Race War in America was published in 1996 by Carl Rowan, the black columnist and former ambassador to Finland. The title is not ironic. He foresaw a major racial explosion. The book of course was furiously ignored. It should not have been. It dealt with an apocalyptic vision that has lurked around the edges of American consciousness since before the Civil War. And still does. We just don’t talk about it.

Well, some of us do. But nobody is listening. Meanwhile, in the ‘hood, the bandoliers are loading….

Our racial policy has proved a disaster. Sixty years after Brown vs. the School Board, blacks have not assimilated. They constitute a separate people having almost nothing in common with the surrounding European society. They fiercely maintain their identity with their own music, dialect, customs, dress, and names. All attempts to turn them into middle-class whites in darker packaging have failed. Only relentless governmental pressure forces an appearance of partial integration.

Gee, there’s an echo in here.

We now have dense concentrations of unemployed, unemployable blacks leading meaningless lives in rotting cities. They are angry, blame whites for their troubles, and do not have a lot to lose. The torching of Los Angeles in 1992 is endlessly repeatable. Only a spark is needed.

Have a nice day.

Fred looks at journalism in America.

Journalism in America, and perhaps everywhere, works according to unacknowledged templates in which the reporter fills in blanks, thus saving him the nuisance of thought, for which he is generally not well suited anyway. In matters of race, it also saves him from being drawn and quartered for Crime Thought. If he follows the template, he is safe. Stupidity, sloth, and cowardice are thus fertilized.

And that says all that really needs to be said about journalism in America. But read the rest of it anyway.

Fred has some thoughts on race relations in America.

Our current poster for successful racial policy is, as all the world probably knows, the shooting of the improbably named Travon Martin, black, by an Hispanic improbably named Zimmerman. The death has been improbably termed, by professional blacks, “genocide.” Whatever happened to dictionaries, I wonder.

Perhaps the worst thing about the case is the appalling English it revealed, “He dont be doing nothing aint right he just….” Usually the brighter and more literate of a group spend time on the internet. Heaven help us. These inarticulate mutterings devoid of punctuation or any grasp of the structure of the language illustrate what we know but ignore: We are screwed. In 2012, in a technological society that sends space craft to Mars, we have millions of illiterates, or close enough that it doesn’t make any difference.

This, not genocide, is the worst thing afflicting blacks. Years back I walked a foot beat with a cop on Capitol Hill. The cop started chatting with a black kid of maybe eleven. He suggested mildly that the boy ought to be home reading instead of hanging out on the street. “I ain’t read no boo-oo-ook,” said the child with infinite scorn. Exactly.

That’s Acting White, and participants in the Degenerate Separatist Black Culture avoid it religiously. With results as you see them.

Also visible in the prop-wash of the shooting is the seething, unreasoning hatred for whites. Of course not all blacks hate whites equally, or at all. If you are white, the black economist next door probably doesn’t hate you and wants for his children what you want for yours. Well and good. But I can show you parts, many parts, of Washington or Chicago or Los Angeles where, if you are white, you wouldn’t last an hour after the sun went down.

Exactly the split I’ve been talking about between those black people who have successfully assimilated to mainstream American culture, and those still stuck in DSBC. Consider the fairly precise parallel in the relationship between Israelis and ‘Palestinians’, and think about whether the next step might be black suicide bombers taking on the random McDonalds or Pizza Hut in an upscale suburb.

Practically speaking, it doesn’t matter what happened to Trayvon. Millions of blacks are going to believe that an innocent upstanding young black kid was murdered by a racist white because he as black. The view is visceral, irrational, unconcerned with facts, and based on the bedrock of the understanding of blacks: We are victims of Whitey.

Just like OJ, the modern poster boy for “He dont be doing nothing aint right he just….” — the mythology of black victimhood is watered with the blood of supposed martyrs, most of whom are as much creatures of fantasy as King Arthur’s knights.

The facts are that racial attacks by blacks against whites, against Asians, are far, far more common than attacks by whites or Asians against blacks. A glance at the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, or the National Crime Victimization Survey, makes this obvious. Every cop knows it. I suspect that almost everyone knows it, though many don’t want to say it.

But that doesn’t show up in the Lamestream Media, because it doesn’t fit the Narrative that blacks are invariably victims and whites invariably oppressors. That’s especially amusing considering that the on-air personalities peddling this bullshit are almost invariably white themselves, with a few token NAMs for ‘commentary’. (Yeah, Nora O’Donnell, I’m lookin’ at you.)

But what effect does this highly directed coverage have on blacks of no education? On those who can’t read or who read so poorly that they don’t? In eight years as police reporter for the Washington Times, I went into many homes of urban blacks who had called the cops. I do not recall ever seeing a book. We are speaking of a people whose only source of information is television.

Can you say ‘Palestinians’? I’m sure you can.

The divide extends to the White House. Obama said nothing unreasonable about the shooting, only that the country needed to get to the bottom of it. But he says nothing of the constant series of beatings and killings of whites by blacks. Various commentators have called him the first post-racial president. No. He is the first black president.

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

Societies work best when they have a uniform culture. The next best thing is a dominant culture to which small numbers of people of similar culture must accommodate themselves. We see this in America with the Chinese, who are studious, industrious, abide by the laws, and do not set themselves in opposition to the ambient European ethos. They are few enough, similar enough, and quiet enough that it works.

But blacks are too many, too different, and too culturally raucous. Some syncretism occurs around the edges, yet even the middle classes of the two races mix seldom and somewhat awkwardly.

I do not see how things can change. The sprawling black regions of the cities are so homogeneous, so big, and so isolated from the white world, television aside, as not to be susceptible to outside influence. Whites do not go in, and blacks do not come out. A steady-state model of the universe, so to speak.

Be careful not to step in the diversity on your way out.

Read it.

Seth Godin recently mentioned something that Clay Shirky has said about the television industry: Forty years ago, you only had to be better than two other shows. Now you have to better than everybody.

The winner-take-all society …

Big-name schools like MIT and Harvard have made full courses, and even suites of courses, available on-line. One of my more experienced colleagues began to get antsy when this process picked up speed a few years ago. Who wouldn’t prefer MIT’s artificial intelligence course over ours? These courses weren’t yet available for credit, which left us with hope. We offer our course as part of a coherent program of study that leads to a credential that students and employers value. But in time…

… comes to education.

The Khan Academy offerings are significant here.

It’s no longer enough to be the best teaching university in your state or neighborhood. Now you have to better than everybody. If you are a computer science department, that seems an insurmountable task. Maybe you can be better than Illinois-Springfield (and maybe not!), but how can you be better than Stanford, MIT, and Harvard?

What gets learned is going to depend far more on how good the student is than on how good the school is, because students will have easy access to the best schools in the world, and the quality of the school ceases to be a meaningful constraint.

How will that affect ‘credentialing’? If everybody can take a course at MIT, how do you decide who gets an MIT degree? Will the Educational Testing Service branch out into degree examinations leading to something like the GED? (Probably, since the SAT and ACT won’t be needed to take courses online.) Certainly MIT and Wide Spot Community College differ in their teacher quality, but when degrees will be based on examination results, will the one be able to convince us that it can make a better degree examination than the other? Will world-famous universities start ‘franchises’ like KFC, with local offices to administer exams and grant degrees?

Read it.

That’s the problem with open borders, pretty soon you get a lot of riff-raff moving in.

Michigan has the same problem.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

ABC News has got hold of a photo of the back of George Zimmerman’s head, purportedly taken three minutes after Trayvon Martin was shot to death. It shows blood trickling down the back of Zimmerman’s head from two cuts, as well as a possible contusion forming on the crown of his head.

So I guess all of the whiners will apologize, right? Wrong.

An attorney for the Martin family, Benjamin Crump, told ABC the photo changed nothing. ”How bad could it have been if they didn’t take him to the hospital [and] didn’t stitch him up,” he said.

As you can see, it’s not about the facts, it’s about the Narrative. They could find video footage of Martin pounding Zimmerman’s head repeatedly on the ground, and they’d still say that Zimmerman shot the poor innocent little thug down in cold blood.

Read it.

Boffins in Taiwan and the University of California predict that nanoscale CMOS memory could soon be on its way after research showed nanodot memory operating 10 to 100 times faster than current RAM. The electro-optics researchers also emphasised that they had used materials that are compatible with mainstream integrated circuit technologies…

We have the technology.

Read it.

Having an asinine hairdo is like having asinine political leaders who can’t pass a budget, much less balance one. Sure, through a triumph of the will, you can pretend reality is non-existent. You can fake it, as though no one can see through your wretched toupée, your cooked numbers on unemployment and inflation. You can pretend that the bankruptcy of your failed social welfare state isn’t poking out through the endless smoke and mirrors, or that status as the world’s reserve currency is a license to inflate the currency at will.

Freeberg is always worth reading.

Part of the Architect/Medicator divide is that medicators want to make everyone else a medicator, and a defining behavior of Medicators is that they react emotionally to things. The logical consequence to all that is, people who react emotionally to things want everyone else to react emotionally to things…which, we see, is true. They forget the “O.J. Simpson Trial” rule: Two people from different walks of life, can see exactly the same thing, and come away with wildly different conclusions about what it means, with neither one of them sustaining the slightest question or doubt about what they’ve concluded.

There is, indeed, a lot of that going around. (This afflicts judges and juries, too; one of the reasons I’m not practicing law.)

When people are bludgeoned into this living-of-life-to-avoid-conflict, sooner or later, you always see someone, somewhere, laboring under a commandment that they need to stop living life, or to live less life. So that someone else isn’t offended. Very often, when the “someone else” doesn’t actually exist, and is thought about only as a hypothetical: “Take that American flag down, someone might find it offensive.”

Not an actual person, mind you, much less an actual person with a persuasive argument on his side; some hypothetical person who may or may not exist but nevertheless has some mystical power to constrain the behavior of real people. This is stupid.

Freeberg looks at ‘climate change’.

I’m having a problem with my observation of the scientific method being applied to the question of an approaching climate-change cataclysm. I characterized my problem as a “Clark Kent and Superman” problem, by which I mean, I’m seeing these two components but never in the same room at the same time. I see people applying the scientific method to figuring out what’s going on with the climate, and I’m seeing prognostications of doom. But the scientific method and the doomsaying are never in the same room at the same time.

Read it.

To the world’s military leaders, the debate over climate change is long over. They are preparing for a new kind of Cold War in the Arctic, anticipating that rising temperatures there will open up a treasure trove of resources, long-dreamed-of sea lanes and a slew of potential conflicts.

Hey, which one of you guys is Rock Hudson?

Read it.

Apparently this is the 100th anniversary of his death … if he actually died….

Read it.

Two years ago an “Australian” named Zialloh Abrahimzadeh killed his estranged wife in front of 300 witnesses at the Adelaide Convention Centre. The issue between them was a quarrel over the financial settlement of their joint property in their native Iran. Mr. Abrahimzadeh took the opportunity to kill his wife during a Persian cultural festival at the convention center.

Apparently ol’ Zialloh is claiming that he is a victim, too. Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

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It’ll probably end poorly. I don’t think there will be civil war in any countries, just weary acquiescence to illiberal forces on one side and ever-constricting forces on the other. An English school considers banning alcohol on campus because 20% of the students are Muslim, that’s the former; the latter is more surveillance, more internet monitoring, carbon audits, and so on. Where the illiberal demands collide with the values of the overclass – say, a Muslim innkeeper refuses service to a gay couple – there will be an assertion of the overclass values and a simultaneous carve-out of regions where it is tacitly assumed those values will not be enforced.

Is there any next at all? Maybe that’s the problem: you invent democracy, classical music, and perfect representational art, and there’s not a lot left to match your previous achievements. Europe is a highly successful band that hasn’t had a good studio album in three years.

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As Michael Moynihan points out, it could have been drawn by Julius Streicher.

And once again we see proof that Jonah Goldberg was right, that the left is merely fascism in a Clever Plastic Disguise.

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President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign is suddenly making an “urgent” push to hire more minorities, particularly blacks, Politico reports. The move comes after conservative outlets such as Breitbart News reported the stunning and hypocritical lack of diversity among Obama 2012 staffers at his campaign headquarters in Chicago–in photos that his own campaign made public.

While the move is obviously a response to the firestorm the photos caused–which resembled the lily-white profile of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement last fall–it took Politico 18 paragraphs and 972 words to mention the photos that most likely spurred Obama campaign officials to send out e-mails to African-American leaders for urgent “help” in finding “qualified, African American candidates for some of these positions” in what is going to be a “fast moving process.”

So Unca Barry is going to purge his campaign staff of some SWPL people from the right side of the bell curve in order to replace them with people from the left side of the bell curve.

I’m good with that.

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To speak about the federal power and about law, all in the same breath, anyway opens the door to bitter cynicism. Some of the key laws the federal government is entrusted with enforcing are left un-enforced, because the federal executive, for cold political reasons, wants to pander to constituencies who’d prefer them not enforced.

Poster boy here: Onyango Obama, the president’s uncle, an illegal immigrant from Kenya. Last week Radio Derb reported on Mr Obama having had his Massachusetts driver’s license suspended for 45 days after he admitted to driving drunk. Mr Obama is manager of a liquor sotore in Framingham, Massachusetts; so the Scarface rule may be worth re-stating here: “Don’t get high on your own supply.” Anyway, the news last week was that Mr Obama’s driver’s license had been suspended.

This week’s news is, that with one bound he was free! Yes, Mr Obama has been given a hardship driver’s license from the state Registry of Motor Vehicles. A hardship license is what you get if you can show that not having a driver’s license poses an undue hardship on your livelihood — in this case, Mr Obama’s livelihood as a liquor-store manager. In applying for the hardship license, Mr Obama fortified his case with a letter from his employer, Conti Liquors, and also with proof — maybe it was 120 proof, maybe 150 proof, I don’t know — that he’d enrolled in an alcohol-treatment program. Apparently there is no public transportation in Framingham.

So the state law that deprived Mr Obama of his driver’s license is just a joke law. They put up this elaborate, quite expensive show of a judicial proceeding, with a ruling from the bench and a sentencing, but they don’t mean it. It’s just pretend: like a children’s game, like the pretend federal law that says, direct quote from Section 8 U.S. Code 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv)(b)(iii), quote: “It is unlawful to hire an alien, to recruit an alien, or to refer an illegal alien for a fee, knowing the illegal alien is unauthorized to work in the United States. It is equally unlawful to continue to employ an illegal alien knowing that the illegal alien is unauthorized to work.” End quote. That’s a joke law, too; that’s a pretend law, too; or, if it’s not, why is Conti Liquors of Framingham, Massachusetts not explaining themselves to a federal judge?

This is what the public is missing by having Derb defenestrated from National Review. Rich Lowry is not only a coward, he is also a fool.

Read it. And watch the video.

The major difference between U.N. monitors and rabbits is that rabbits make a nutritious meal.