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This is the real problem. Technology actually is approaching the magic point. You want to know how your laptop works. You can’t know. Even the people who made it don’t know. Apple has to call up LG or Sharp when it wants a high-density display. LG has to call Samsung when they want MLC flash storage. Samsung has to call NVIDIA when they want graphics cores. NVIDIA has to call ARM to make SoC architecture. Vertical integration is a thing of the past because no company can do it all. It took Intel five years and billions of dollars to develop just the processor your laptop runs today. The whole system is the culmination of a century of work by geniuses and specialists. Control over your hardware is the flimsiest of illusions. You only understand the snow frosting the top of the iceberg, and even then all you can do to fix it is pay for more.

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A stem-cell biologist has had an eye-opening success in his latest effort to mimic mammalian organ development in vitro. Yoshiki Sasai of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CBD) in Kobe, Japan, has grown the precursor of a human eye in the lab.

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Michelle Apperson, a teacher at the Sutterville Elementary School in Sacramento who was named “teacher of the year” by the school district, was fired because she was outranked in seniority.

The state’s budget deficit, which has ballooned to $16 million, has triggered a move by Governor Jerry Brown to make cuts across the board, and schools across the state are being forced by budget cuts to fire thousands of teachers.

For the Union makes us … unemployed?

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A new study shows that the ranks of people earning $1 million or more are highly variable from year to year. That implies that millionaires aren’t quite the monolithic class that some political rhetoric might suggest.

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“Sometimes I think that the only people in this country who worry more about money than the poor are the very wealthy,” Kenny says. “They worry about losing it, they worry about how it’s invested, they worry about the effect it’s going to have. And as the zeroes increase, the dilemmas get bigger.”

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It’s hard to know which is worse: the progs’ pride in their “nuanced thinking” or the complete absence of any evidence of it in their actions.  Or – no – maybe that’s a little over-simple.  There is one way in which they show an amazing plasiticity, which no doubt fools them into thinking that they’re nuanced.  They are masters of winnowing out some measly sliver of a difference between what they are vociferously condemning and what they are in fact advocating or doing at the moment.  Then they project searchlight levels of wishful thinking at that sliver in the hope of casting enough of a shadow for them to hide in.

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    One child, Hamza, wearing the uniform of the Al Quds Brigades of Islamic Jihad and carrying a wooden weapon, said “I love the resistance and the martyrs and Palestine, and I want to blow up the most Zionists in a process of martyrdom and kill them.”

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

Read it.

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

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

Read it.

Hey, we’re flogging a book, here. These things don’t sell themselves, you know.

Never trust anybody who shaves his head.

Freeberg at his best.

Progressives have a strange relationship with the time stream, just as they have a strange relationship with that word “democracy.” Just as they seem to define “democracy” as “everyone does everything my way, whether they want to or not” — they speak of future events as if they have occurred in the past. More specifically, they speak of them as if it is entirely responsible & safe to forget all about probability.

Specifically, if anything bad might happen, then it definitely will happen, and by God we’d better get cracking on heading it off. No time to waste!

Normal people with fully working brains, see “democracy” as what it really is. It’s an exchange. We’re all going to give up a lot of control, now, so that later on we can say “right or wrong, this was the decision of those who took the time to participate.” It does not make the final outcome more correct, or even more virtuous, nor is it supposed to. It solves no problem at all, other than the complaints that might properly be aired, later on, that so-and-so was not consulted.

The greatest value of ‘democracy’ is what the Don Draper crowd would call buy-in. Those who are affected by a decision feel better if they were consulted, even if they didn’t come out on top when the decision is made. That’s why the Founding Fathers were so on about ‘taxation without representation is tyranny’. They didn’t necessarily have things go their way; but they felt entitled to input.

Whatever problems you have that are related to resentments about this person or that person not having a say, will be addressed, and all the other problems will not be. All this is self-evident to those of us who see democracy as what it really is; those of us who are not brain damaged.

Indeed. Democracy doesn’t fix all problems, or guarantee the best result — all it does is guarantee that everybody is more or less okay with the decision.

Read it.

It was written in 1853 by his great-great grandmother who was called Daniels and was a local herbalist in Llanelli, South Wales.

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Just the people we want in charge of our health care — think of how much money we’d save!

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So much for the rule of law.  This guy wants reelection, so to hell with the Congress.

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

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You’ve read all the rest, now read the best….

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Isn’t it entertaining the way politicians get away with doing stuff that would land somebody in the private sector in jail or on the street? (Well, I suppose there’s still time for the latter….)

Gavin McInnes nails it.

The Turd World will catch up with us in a hundred years, so leave ’em be and let ’em have at it. We need to get out of the Middle East because you can’t fast-forward progress. Let nature run its course.

…

Do you remember when we forbade calendars with pictures of kittens on them? Me, neither. How about that strange epoch when Christians insisted women could only hang out with men they breast-feed? Never happened. Islam isn’t a culture that needs to be coaxed toward Western values. It’s a culture that has gone off the deep end forever. I no longer care if it’s because of inbreeding or cultural hijacking or brainwashing. That part of the world is irretrievably lost and there’s nothing we can do about it. Let’s cut the cord and bid them adieu for good. They can hop on their camels and drive through whatever alternate universe they choose and take whatever turn they want as long as they don’t end up in our backyard.

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Well, his story made as much sense as anything we’ve heard out of Obama.

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Because that’s what politicians do.

Paul Gottfried is down with it.

But I believe New York City has a legal and even moral right to enact the mayor’s law. He was duly elected. And his periodic attempts to control people’s eating habits represent exactly the kind of leftist government that New Yorkers seem to relish. Bloomy’s proposed measure already enjoys 42% public approval. If the media work a bit harder, they may be able to ratchet up the approval ratings to 60 or even 70 percent. In a federal republic of the kind this country used to be, there should be different places for people with different lifestyles. I’d be delighted if all the nuts moved to New York, San Francisco, and a few other urban centers, as long as they and their governments left me alone.

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Rhode Island is being crushed by pension debt, our cities are suffocating, we’re driving businesses away with regulatory minutiae, and we’re hemorrhaging young people.  Oh, and we just threw away up to $75 million on a video game company run by a former baseball player.

So what are our Governor and legislature spending their time on?

A Homeless Bill of Rights….

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

Women minorities hardest hit, of course.

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New tests show that crude Spanish cave paintings of a red sphere and handprints are the oldest in the world, so ancient they may not have been by modern man.

Some scientists say they might have even been made by the much-maligned Neanderthals, but others disagree.

I always knew that Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso weren’t really human.

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This is on top of a Federal levy of at least $3oo,ooo (remember, this is wage income).

Of course, you can avoid all this agita (and, you know, having to go to work every day) by going on welfare….

Notice that every damned one of them is a blue state. (Y’all come to Texas, where we don’t stick our hands in your pocket all the way down to your socks.)

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President Obama touts the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler as one of the signature successes of his administration. He argues that the estimated $23 billion the taxpayers lost was worth paying to avoid massive job losses. However, our research finds that the president could have both kept the auto makers running and avoided losing money.

The preferential treatment given to the United Auto Workers accounts for the American taxpayers’ entire losses from the bailout. Had the UAW received normal treatment in standard bankruptcy proceedings, the Treasury would have recouped its entire investment. Three irregularities in the bankruptcy case resulted in a windfall to the UAW.

For the Union makes him strong.

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To which one must also add: Don’t take any shit from the natives.

Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.

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The poor in Britain face a “perfect storm” of benefit cuts, rising living costs and a lack of jobs that result in a return to Victorian levels of inequality, a charity has said.

Women and minorities hardest hit, of course.

Left as an unjustified assumption is that ‘inequality’, per se, is somehow a Serious Problem … which of  course it is to the Levelers in OxFam — but for normal people? Not so much.

Benefit cuts? Well, if fifty years of socialist kleptocracy hadn’t raised two generations of slackers dependent on the government, that wouldn’t be a problem. Rising living costs? Try toting up the costs of silly government regulations layered on top of normal business costs. (Guess how much of the price of auto fuel is taxes. No wonder ‘living costs’ are rising.) Lack of jobs? Figure the costs of hiring a new worker under the Nanny State and see whether you can make a profit doing so.

So what’s the solution? According to OxFam, more government. ‘Let’s try adding more of what got us in this situation in the first place! Of course, what a wonderful idea!’

Read it.

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

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

Read it.

German and Italian officials warned the US on Wednesday that plans to cut off funding for a ground-based Nato missile defence programme built by Lockheed Martin Corp would endanger US ties with their countries.

Translation: ‘You better not even think about not spending money on defending us, or we’ll be offended.’

Italian Defense Minister Giampaolo Di Paola urged Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, to ensure continued funding for the Medium Extended Air and Missile Defense System (MEADS) programme given its importance to Nato’s future plans and transatlantic co-operation and collaboration.

Look, guys, the purpose of NATO was to defend against the Soviet Union. Hate to break the news to you, but the Soviet Union is gone. Therefore there is no need for NATO any more. So if you want to spend money on sophisticated defense weapons systems, spend your own. (Oops, I forgot — you don’t have any, after having ‘spread the wealth around’ for forty years such that there isn’t any left.)

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, takes a look at Smithsonian, a Voice of the Crust.

And do people still use the word “vibrant” non-ironically to mean something other than “crime-riddled multicultural slum”? On one hand, Key West is whiter than the USA at large, though only slightly (66.1%). On the other, it has 19% more crime than the US average given by city-data.com, with particularly high levels of burglary and theft.

Jehu is not afraid to ask the obvious questions.

If you’re a URM (Under-represented minority), and we can plausibly delude ourselves that you MIGHT be adequate to the task, we are ALWAYS hiring.  You’ll find this true of most companies.  So where’s the white privilege?

Oh, I hear you saying, but white people have an easier time getting the necessary credential—you hire pretty much just STEM MS and PhD holders right?

Do you really want to go there?  You’ll find that as a minority of the non-Asian variety, your ability to get accepted into graduate school, and more importantly, to get a full ride there is vastly enhanced.  So where’s the white privilege?

Steve Sailer is invited to a regular Fashionable Victim Class hate-fest.

In Orwell’s 1984, they got all this done in only two minutes. But that was fiction.

Read it.

Women and minorities hardest hit.

Actually, I’m kinda looking forward to it. All the rabid survivalists are on our side.

Read it.

Service set identifiers, or SSIDs, are essentially the network names that people give to their wireless networks. It turns out many Americans–and people across the world–are turning to SSIDs as a unique way to express their political sentiments. Much in the same way a yard sign pronounces to the world your political proclivities, so too can the naming of your SSID.

Read it.

Grab a coffee, add two sugars, and check the news on your tablet: you’ve just helped kill off a species in a country you might never have heard of.

Thank God. I was afraid I’d never have an opportunity to make a difference.

As much as a third of global species threats are due to global trade, the research finds. This is a huge shift, the researchers say, compared to a pre-globalised world, where many species threats were localized (due, for example, to local demands for food, fuel and living space).

We have the technology.

Read it.

Americans may never again buy clothes labeled “made in China” if robot sewing machines can beat Chinese costs of labor. The Pentagon has given $1.2 million to a Georgia Tech spinoff company to turn that futuristic concept into reality.

Such computer-controlled sewing machines must precisely move fabric under the needle “stitch by stitch” and carefully track passing threads — a job normally done with human hands and eyesight. Success could lead to automated U.S. factories that “produce garments with zero direct labor,” according to the contract issued by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on June 5.

Hear, hear!

Fife council has pushed ahead with its mobile working plans by issuing building services staff with Motorola-built handheld devices to receive job instructions.

A number of frontline staff have been using mobile phones to receive information for carrying out scheduled repairs and maintenance in council homes and non-domestic properties over the past two and a half years. The council said that although this has led to an increase in productivity, with more jobs per person completed daily, using mobile phones still required significant manual input.

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Blogger Lindsay Leveen at Green Explored explains, in layman’s terms, how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has created data “that disobey the laws of thermodynamics so that the worthless government policy of favoring plug in vehicles over gas or diesel powered vehicles can be supported by the public.” The key, according to Leveen, is that the EPA deliberately ignores energy losses at each stage of the electrical process–meaning that the EPA’s claim of 118 miles per gallon (MPG) for the Honda Fit means less than 41 MPG in reality.

Well, you could always hitch a horse to the front of it. Think of how many MPG you’d get then.

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Here’s your sign….

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Think of it as evolution in action.

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Mess with the bull, you get the horns every time.

Hey, he knew the job was dangerous when he took it….

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The dysfunctional Afro-American subculture once again makes the news.

Be careful not to step in the diversity.

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Neal Stephenson, the celebrated sci-fi and speculative fiction writer, is sick of the superficial way that sword fighting is treated in video games, and the self-described “swordsmanship geek” wants to fix the injustice. He’s heading up the development of an arena combat game called Clang (video below) that aims to bring the “obsessive attention to real-world detail” found in today’s immensely-customizable shooters to the more nuanced world of sword-to-sword warfare. In order to make Clang a reality, he’s turning to Kickstarter to raise the $500,000 his team needs.

And about time, too.

Read it.

Militants attacked two churches in Nigeria on Sunday, spraying the congregation of one with bullets, killing several people, and blowing up a car in a suicide bombing at the other, injuring 41, witnesses said.

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

Read it.

I sincerely wish that the word “fair” could be deleted from all political conversations.  No one this side of sociopathy openly campaigns for unfairness.  The question for all fair-minded (!) people is “what is fair?”  Just because, in your view, reality situation Y is unfair does not prove that Y is indeed unfair.  An equally magnanimous, well-meaning, and fair-minded (!) person might well assess Y to be fair.

The notorious Sean Rayment overheats his cliche machine.

It’s hot, dark, airless and smells of rotting wood. The floor is uneven and my guide, a US soldier, warns me that there may be snakes.

I walk gingerly to the centre of the room where a wooden table is bolted to the floor. The hut is divided into two rooms, each the mirror image of the other.

There are no windows, just space for an air-conditioning unit; the ceilings and walls have been soundproofed.

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This is the necessary and sufficient reason to ban burkas; they provide a convenient disguise for persons of ill intent who do not hesitate to exploit the natural impulses of civilized people to accommodate their religious customs. There is no way to distinguish a modest Muslim woman from a murderous male Muslim terrorist.

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

Read it.

I like it. It has texture, and scope.

In a world of Nanny Bloombergs, magnificent achievement is still possible.

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Published in the spring of 1962, Michael Harrington’s The Other America was a sweeping description of the country’s poor, combined with an appeal to the federal government and “better-off” to save them. It became one of the best-selling books ever authored by an American socialist, inspired the creation of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society regime, and has been routinely hailed as one of the most influential books of the 20th century. This year partisans of the welfare state are commemorating the golden anniversary of The Other America with a series of celebrations and renewed calls for government programs to save the poor once more.