Read it.

The Navy’s robotic fighter just got one step closer to earning its wings. The X-47B, an unmanned stealth attack jet, has completed the first major phase of flight testing on its way to become the first aircraft to be able to land and take off from the deck of an aircraft carrier –completely autonomously.

The Navy has had the SPN-42 ACLS (automatic carrier landing system) that can land a plane on a carrier flight deck without the intervention of a pilot since the early 70s — I was part of the crew on the USS John F Kennedy who maintained that gear. So this won’t be a big stretch. The autonomous refueling is the impressive part.

Steve Sailer points out that black parents do their kids no favors with these bizarre names.

Out of the corner of my eye while reading Williams’s essay, I saw a link entitled “Charles M. Blow: Trayvon Martin.” My immediate thought was, “Oh, good, Trayvon sounds like a black name. This must be about another intelligent African-American writing or doing something interesting.”

But my brain answered back: “Nope, it’s about a Trayvon, not a Thomas Chatterton. It’s not on the sports page, so it’s going to be messed-up and miserable. And because it’s in the Times, not the Post, Trayvon’s going to be the victim, not the victimizer.”

Was that stereotyping? No doubt.

Stereotypes arise because of observed patterns of behavior. No patterns of behavior, no stereotyping. Example: Both blacks and Jews have historically been widely hated and subject to derogatory stereotypes — but blacks aren’t stereotyped as bloodsucking monylenders, and Jews aren’t stereotyped as lazy, shiftless and stupid. Chinese aren’t stereotyped as religious terrorists, Arabs aren’t stereotyped as melancholy drunkards, and Russians aren’t stereotyped as parent-dominated workaholics. Think about why that is.

Trayvon had tried to fit the stereotype of young black males aspiring to the thug life, picking a Twitter handle based on a rap song featuring convicted killer C-Murder. Just as Zimmerman had worried, Trayvon likely had dabbled in burglary: Martin was nabbed at his high school last fall with a backpack containing women’s jewelry and a screwdriver.

The win-win solution against stereotyping is for blacks to stop living down to their profiles.

The way to dissolve stereotypes is for people to quit embracing the patterns of behavior that reinforce the stereotype. Unfortunately, the political fashion of Identity Politics is for stereotyped groups to embrace, rather than reject, their stereotypes. In an environment where academically ambitious black kids can be shunned for ‘acting white’, there really is no hope.

Freeberg lays it out.

… they react to a situation precisely the way a rational person would — but, not in that situation, in a different one. Let us call this one “Survival Staples” or “Starvation Imminent.” Without any supporting evidence at all, and without even any persuasive suggestion, liberals tend to behave as if the commodity-of-the-moment is in such short supply, and is so crucial to the continuing survival of the humans, be they in collectives or be they merely individuals — that an inexhaustible supply of the whatever-it-is becomes a “right.” Once they’re on this pathway, they get lost, instantly, for they adhere to the notion that mere difficulty involved in acquiring it, nevermind outright failure, constitutes an intolerable encroachment upon that right.

Crime…without an actual “bad guy.” So, of course, one has to be invented, that’s the next step.

Read it.

In my article, “The Food-Safety Fallacy: More Regulation Doesn’t Necessarily Make Food Safer,” I use ancient and more recent historical examples of flawed rules to rebut the common misconception that more food-safety regulation means safer food. Rather, history shows us that food-safety regulations have often made food (and, consequently, people) less safe.

Read it.

Actresses should be cast in male roles on stage, says the union Equity as it complains about the lack of roles for women in theatre.

How long before playwrights are required by law to have an equal number of parts for men and women? Then the next step is to make sure the racial composition is Politically Correct.

Read it.

The Big Mac isn’t just a greasy hallmark of modern technological wizardry. It’s also a tool for economists to measure the wealth of nations.

Read it.

Carlos Miller of Photography is Not a Crime is helping publicize (and test) a new iPhone app that automatically streams video as a user is recording it and stores it remotely in a cloud, thus preventing grabby law enforcement officers from deleting footage.

Which is, of course the crime of conversion, when it isn’t actual obstruction of justice. But we all know that police never get called on that sort of thing. This will redress the balance somewhat.

Big Brother doesn’t like it when you’re watching him back.

Read it.

It’s been an interesting day for a developing market which seems so utterly niche as to be untrue. There really are startups out there linking recipes to supermarket so you can just buy the food you need to make the dishes. Niche, but potentially quite powerful. Two start-ups announced funding today in the UK. Whisk, a startup produced by a minor UK TV celebrity, has raised £170,000 for a product that has yet to launch, while Foodity has secured over £300,000 seed funding for a platform that’s already being traded on and has customers after bootstrapping for two years.

Foodity produces an e-commerce toolkit for recipe publishers on all platforms that lets consumers buy recipe ingredients at major online grocers in the UK, Europe and the US; plus a data platform and an advertising/analytics module. The startup already has Premier Foods, (the UK’s biggest food manufacturer) as a customer and a number of big grocery retailers, as yet unannounced.

Read it.

U.S. military leaders are promising a small-scale, but effective plan for dealing with terrorist threats throughout Africa.  The head of the military’s Africa Command says that U.S. forces are carrying out reconnaissance missions across the continent but Washington has no plans to expand its permanent presence in Africa.

Oh, they never do. But somehow it just seems to happen. Funny how that works.

My question is, Why are we still spending money in Europe, Soviet Communism now being extinct?

Paul Rahe looks at the Obamacare decision.

In his opinion, the Chief Justice affirmed the principle asserted by Justices Kennedy, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas. He made it clear that the commerce clause does not give Congress authority over economic activity that we do not engage in. He also made it clear that the necessary and proper clause cannot be applied to achieve this end. In short, he joined these four Justices in setting a clear limit to the commerce clause, and he paved the way for future challenges to extensions of the regulatory state.

At the same time, he dodged the political firestorm, and nearly all of the liberals who have commented on the matter – a slow-thinking lot, in my opinion – have applauded what they take to be cowardice on his part as “judiciousness.” Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit was among the first to recognize that Roberts might be playing an elaborate game. He compared the decision to Marbury v. Madison, where Chief Justice John Marshall surrendered in the case before the court while firmly and eloquently reasserting the Court’s right and responsibility to engage in judicial review; and Reynolds pointed to one crucial fact: Senate rules do not allow a filibuster when the bill under consideration has to do with imposing or repealing a tax. If the Republicans take the Senate and the Presidency, they can now repeal the individual mandate. They will not need sixty votes.

Read it.

Jury nullification, in which jurors refuse to convict defendants under laws they find objectionable or inappropriately applied, is a favored tactic of many libertarians who, rightly or wrongly perceive individual liberty as, at best, a minority taste among their neighbors. They like the idea of a tool that can be wielded on the spot to shield people from powerful control freaks without first having to win a popularity contest. But nullification is useful only if people know about. And last week, New Hampshire’s governor signed a law requiring the state’s judges to permit defense attorneys to inform jurors of their right to nullify the law.

Now, this is very curious. Lynch is a Democrat, which in New Hampshire means he’s a transplant from Massachusetts, one of the most liberal states in the nation. Democrats, especially Massachusetts Democrats (think Kennedys) aren’t famous for being very libertarian. So what’s his agenda here?

Data point 1: New Hampshire, long a bastion of individual rights (which these days is characterized as ‘conservative’, although ‘conservatives’ don’t have a great record when it comes to individual rights), is becoming increasingly liberal because of immigration by left-winger Summer People from the surrounding blue states of Vermont, Maine, and especially Massachusetts.

Data point 2: New Hampshire has a lot of laws that socialists dislike, especially with respect to things like gun rights and property rights.

Suspicion: Lynch sees this as a wedge whereby increasingly liberal immigrants can overturn, in their local communities, laws intended to preserve individual rights without the effort needed to do a state-wide change through a still-Republican-controlled legislature. Muslims are doing the same thing with respect to shari’a law in Britain and Europe, and probably in the United States in places like Michigan (which the Crustian media refuse to report, since it goes against the Party Line).

But only time will tell.

Read it.

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

Read it.

I guess some Communists are more equal than others.

Read it.

When there aren’t any Jews or Americans handy, Muslims will cheerfully murder each other.

A reminder that living together in peace and harmony is not a Muslim value.

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

Read it.

The men expended more energy than Olympic athletes as they hand-hauled their supplies on sledges across hundreds of miles of ice and snow.

Read it.

To which the obvious rejoinder is, ‘With what?’ When last I looked, the Royal Navy has one (1) reasonably new destroyer-class ship and two or three reasonably modern nuclear submarines. And the British army is being reduced to the old ‘guards and garrisons’ level last seen under the Stewarts.

Good luck with that.

Read it.

Six of the 12 instructors under investigation for misconduct face charges ranging from rape to adultery. A senior Air Force commander said nine of those instructors were in the same squadron, briefing reporters at the Pentagon at the same time that one of the accused appeared in a Lackland courtroom.

Read it.

 First there was the “death tax;” now with the Supreme Court’s rationale for Obamacare, the United States has a “birth tax.” Under the law, simply by being born, American citizens are saddled with a tax burden if they are not covered by a health insurance plan. They don’t have to possess anything; they don’t have to do anything; they simply have to be.

This is an unprecedented level of government power. Progressives may point to Social Security as a tax on existence. However, that tax is not collected unless a person engages in some sort of economic transaction such as earning wages. Paying a tax for NOT enrolling in a health insurance plan is a de facto tax on a person’s automatic biological processes. Instead of deducting Social Security from earnings, every heartbeat, regardless of one’s economic activity, will have a calculable monetary value.

The party of Bull Conner returns to its roots.

Once the government is responsible for your health care, your ‘health’ decisions are properly the business of the government. There is no aspect of your life that is now free of second-guessing by some bureaucrat.

Have a good day. Big Brother is watching.

Read it.

Not that they would have contributed anything to the proceeding had they stayed. Their position is entirely predicated on the fact that Holder, like them, is a black Democrat, without respect to the facts of the case. Were he white, or a Republican (or, horror of horrors, a white Republican), they wouldn’t have budged. But identity politics expresses its Third World roots in supporting members of The Tribe regardless of the actual situation (precisely the reason democracy takes no root in the Muslim World). In that, it is profoundly ‘conservative’ — or perhaps ‘regressive’ would be a more accurate term.

Indeed, being an explicitly racist organization devoted to promoting a particular ethnic group and screwing everybody else whenever possible, a good case could be made that Congress — and the people of the United States — would be well rid of them if they stayed away forever.

Read it.

Along with the rest of the Obamassiah’s base.

Obama to The Youth of America: ‘Yes we can! Bend over please.’

The Youth of America to Obama: ‘Thank you, sir! May we have another?’

Read it.

Privacy. Everybody talks about it. Grandstanding politicians make plenty of loud noises in the general direction of the internet, disparaging it for turning your perusal of Kim Kardashian-related articles into targeted ads for breast enhancement surgery and Kanye West tickets. Of course, while these politicians are making all this noise about your privacy, they’re quietly signing off on efforts allowing them to sneak in the backdoor and raid your browser history.

Putting the government in charge of your privacy has never been a great idea. When HIPAA was enacted, its privacy requirements greatly affected the medical community. Like many regulatory acts, HIPAA both raised costs (additional paperwork and other compliance factors) and lowered quality (negatively affecting retrospective research and curtailing proactive follow up care).

Read it.

Since launching last year, HealthTap has built a network of 12,000 U.S.-licensed physicians — no easy task — to allow its users to get answers to medical questions for free without relying on algorithms — and has raised $14 million from Mayfield Fund, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Esther Dyson, and more. With its new mobile apps, HealthTap is essentially trying to bring the house call back to life, giving users the option to text doctors from their mobile devices for free.

Read it.

For many people, the most unbelievable aspect of Natasha Smith’s story is that hundreds of people should have been standing there, unable or unwilling to help.

And the feminists say … [chirp] … [chirp] ….

Read it.

So why do we keep sending them money? I’m hoping it’s stupidity rather than treason.*

* ‘Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.’

Read it.

Dr. Paolo Macchiarini is no stranger to world firsts, and less than a year after performing a synthetic windpipe transplant, the Karolinska Institute Professor has coordinated no less than two successful transplants of synthetic sections of larynx. Amazingly, both patients were able to breathe and talk normally straight after surgery, the basic functions we take for granted that they either struggled with or were simply unable to do before.

Read it.

Read it.

I thought they’d never leave…. Seriously, is it such a surprise when an explicitly racist organization acts like an explicitly racist organization? (Thought experiment: Visualize the fate of a group called ‘Congressional White Caucus’. Which tells you all you need to know about Black-Run America.)

Read it.

Read it.

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

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

Read it.

This strikes me as a great idea.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Now conservationists have urged police to crack down on an explosion in illegal poaching of Roman snails after discovering they were being gathered up en masse to meet a grisly, buttery end in local French restaurants.

Frankly, if I knew that people were hoovering up local snails to sell to French restaurants, I’d be loathe to stand in their way. But that’s me.

Read it.

German court has ruled that circumcising young boys on religious grounds amounts to bodily harm even if parents consent to the procedure.

Cologne state court said the child’s right to physical integrity trumps freedom of religion and parents’ rights, German news agency DAPD reported Tuesday.

Of course they do.

More than one in seven Americans are on food stamps, but the federal government wants even more people to sign up for the safety net program.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been running radio ads for the past four months encouraging those eligible to enroll. The campaign is targeted at the elderly, working poor, the unemployed and Hispanics.

In other words, the traditional Democrat client groups.

The department is spending between $2.5 million and $3 million on paid spots, and free public service announcements are also airing.

Hey, I’ve got a radical idea: How about taking that money and give some free food to poor people?

Read it.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s first reading material each morning, at 5:30, is not a budget update, a legislative proposal or a packet of headlines. It is an e-mail from the Chicago Police Department listing the crimes that were committed during the night that just ended. By 7 a.m., he is calling Garry F. McCarthy, the police superintendent. That is unlikely to be their final conversation of the day, or even of the morning.

Hey, if you want to cut crime, elect a Republican — I don’t think Rudy Giuliani is doing anything right now.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

Tell the truth: Would you really trust your life to a Ford?

Read it.

Archaeologists in Greece’s second-largest city have uncovered a 70-meter (230-foot) section of an ancient road built by the Romans that was city’s main travel artery nearly 2,000 years ago.

The marble-paved road was unearthed during excavations for Thessaloniki’s new subway system, which is due to be completed in four years. The road in the northern port city will be raised to be put on permanent display when the metro opens in 2016.

Eric Raymond has the goods.

The centennial of Alan Turing’s birth brings us the news that Alan Turing probably did not commit suicide by eating a poisoned apple, was not depressed at the time of his death, and that the hormone treatments intended to suppress his homosexual urges had been discontinued a year before he died. I am not in the least surprised by any of this; in fact I have been half-expecting such inversions ever since I began noticing, twenty years or so ago, the increasing mythologization of Turing’s life.

…

Ada Lovelace has been falsely mythologized as the first programmer because she was a woman. In a present struggling with issues of sexual equality, her femaleness has served propaganda purposes too obvious to need rehearsing. Turing’s homosexuality, too, has become a sort of marker or talking point in today’s culture wars.

Read it.

No good deed goes unpunished.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, continues to rush in where angels fear to tread.

Here in the U.S.A., things have definitely gotten worse. The censoring of Don Rickles is surely a bad sign. I don’t believe that would have happened in 1994.

Worst of all is the rise of the Pod People: twenty-something metrosexual media commentators who have somehow persuaded themselves that the real world, at least as manifested in the realities of a multiracial society, does not exist.

Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around.

Drantch and his type — they are all over the media and the internet — scare me. Behind their smooth girlish features and open, orthodontized smiles there lurks an icy intolerance, a coarse thuggishness, a blinkered determination to believe that the world is something other than what it is, and a closed, invincible conviction of their own moral perfection in so believing. (Are there females of the species? Possibly … it’s hard to be sure.) [MSNBC host Rachel Maddow – ‘No one’s gonna confuse me with a Fox News anchor’, Daily News, October 21, 2009]

Read it.

China has repatriated 44 fugitives from its communist neighbour in recent months, said Kim Heung-Kwang, who heads NK Intellectuals Solidarity, a Seoul-based defectors’ group.

Four of them were executed and 40 sent to camps for political prisoners, he told a seminar. South Korean rights groups say there are six political prison camps in the North holding around 200,000 detainees.

A reminder that (a) there are still Communists in the world and (b) they are still evil.

Read it.

Twenty-year-old models which have suggested serious ice loss in the eastern Antarctic have been compared with reality for the first time – and found to be wrong, so much so that it now appears that no ice is being lost at all.

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

Read it.

In short, 95.1 percent of all murder victims and 95.9 percent of all shooting victims in New York City are black or Hispanic. And 90.2 percent of those arrested for murder and 96.7 percent of those arrested for shooting someone are black and Hispanic. I don’t even know where to begin to describe the horror I still feel looking at those numbers. But the word “hunted” comes to mind.

What’s this got to do with The Dark Knight? Well might you ask.

Unlike most major American cities, where Black people engaged in a war of attrition to drive whites out and take political power (though, as Detroit, Memphis, Birmingham, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Philadelphia shows, this does not correlate to economic power), Nolan’s Gotham City is one that appears to be 80 percent or more white.

In the world of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises, the villains are white men like mob boss leader Carmine Falcone, The Scarecrow, The Joker, The League of Shadow’s leader Ra’s Al Ghul, Harvey Dent/ Two-Face, and Bane; men of extraordinary intelligence, motivated by very different reasons to bring Gotham City to its knees.

David Henderson blows the whistle.

There are two ways to take lousy government for granted: (1) to understand clearly how lousy, petty, vicious, self-serving, and narcissistic most government is, and (2) to understand implicitly how lousy, petty, vicious, self-serving, and narcissistic most government is but get so used to it that you hardly notice. I’m in category (1). There are a lot of people in category (2) whom I’m trying to get to category (1).

Case in point: The Supreme Court decision about Obamacare.

The decision is likely to come out next week. Yet we’ve been told that the actual decision was made months ago and it’s probably the case that all the opinions were written weeks ago. So why can’t they tell us? Why make us wait?

Imagine that Apple found a bug in its iPad and came up with a fix. How would you feel if you had just bought an iPad and found out that Apple was going to wait 2 months before releasing the fix? My guess is that you would be angry. Yet I don’t see people getting angry at the Supreme Court. Why? Check out reason (2) above. We are so used to government officials being narcissistic and self-serving that we just accept that they take their sweet time telling us. The fact that waiting until the end of June instead of finding out in, say, mid-May, will cause the misallocation of billions of dollars? No biggie.

This is why, when doctors do clinical trials, if it quickly becomes obvious that the medicine being examined works to fix what’s wrong with people, they cancel the trial and give it to every sick person involved; they don’t wait to finish the trial. Doctors figure that their job is to help sick people, not carry through with some procedural Kabuki dance. Lawyers — not so much.

Read it.

Two months ago, James Lovelock, the godfather of global warming, gave a startling interview to msnbc.com in which he acknowledged he had been unduly “alarmist” about climate change.

…

Lovelock still believes anthropogenic global warming is occurring and that mankind must lower its greenhouse gas emissions, but says it’s now clear the doomsday predictions, including his own (and Al Gore’s) were incorrect.

He responds to attacks on his revised views by noting that, unlike many climate scientists who fear a loss of government funding if they admit error, as a freelance scientist, he’s never been afraid to revise his theories in the face of new evidence. Indeed, that’s how science advances.

…

As he puts it, “so-called ‘sustainable development’ … is meaningless drivel … We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can’t stand windmills at any price.”

Read it.

With summer now upon us, gardening season is in full swing. And that can only mean it’s time for local government officials around the country to try to outdo one another when it comes to preventing everyday people from growing fruit and vegetables in their own yards.

Except for Michelle, of course. Marie Antoinette Michelle playing at being a shepherdess farmer is perfectly okay.

Read it.

Anyone who is active in the political world knows that the most obnoxious, profane, hateful partisans, the ones most likely to engage in harassment, are the left-wing gay activists. So I was not at all surprised to see the latest misbehavior from that source: gay activists invited to the White House for a “gay pride” event by President Obama photographed each other making obscene gestures toward Ronald Reagan’s portrait. Proud of themselves, they posted their trophy photos on Facebook. “Yeah, f– Reagan,” one of the gay activists added, helpfully.

Funny how anti-hate, pro-tolerance activists are the most hateful and intolerant people around.

Read it. And watch the video.

In Texas last Friday, a man originally from Lebanon attempted to kill his daughter, her boyfriend, and his estranged wife. He told police that he didn’t like the fact that his daughter was dating a non-Muslim.

Yet the police and the media are certain there must have been a different motive that doesn’t involve Islam; they are determined that the gunman’s “religious beliefs will not be taken into account.”

Of course they won’t be. He obviously must have done it for some other reason. We must ignore the poor man’s statement about his own motivations; he was under stress when he said that, and is clearly not in his right mind.

Read it.

A historical thesis popularized by Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel, postulates that the tiny and remote Easter Island suffered a devastating ecological collapse as the result of poor stewardship of natural resources by its inhabitants. Diamond goes on to suggest this “ecocide” parallels our own global situation. But these claims have now been challenged by a pair of archaeologists working to investigate the real history of Easter Island.

In a new book titled The Statues That Walked, Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt argue that the story of the downfall of Easter Island as popularized in Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is almost completely false.