Read it.

Invincible Armor links to a piece at Investors.com alleging that Iraq transferred its chemical weapons to Syria shortly before the U.S. launched Operation Iraqi Freedom.

“As Sada told the New York Sun, two Iraqi Airways Boeings were converted to cargo planes by removing the seats, and special Republican Guard units loaded the planes with chemical weapons materials.

Can’t wait to see how the Voices of the Crust will spin this one.

Read it.

When Mitt Romney visited Orange County, California for a fundraiser in May, his campaign promptly paid Newport Beach for security costs.

President Obama’s campaign, on the other hand, still has not paid a $35,000 bill incurred when he went to a private home in Corona del Mar, in February, for a fundraiser that required, according to the Los Angeles Times, “street closures and additional security requirements for the president.”

Hey, spending other people’s money is what being a Democrat is all about. Deal with it.

Read it.

And the ‘progressives’ say: [chirp] … [chirp] … [chirp] ….

Read it.

The Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that in 2015 the country will have 62,900 fewer doctors than needed. And that number will more than double by 2025, as the expansion of insurance coverage and the aging of baby boomers drive up demand for care. Even without the health care law, the shortfall of doctors in 2025 would still exceed 100,000.

Universal health care is no good without enough practitioners to provide it. Unlike dollars or shoes, you can’t just churn out more as you need them.

Jerry Pournelle has some thoughts.

Most interesting to me:

The best thing one can do for giant corporations is to thicken the business environment with regulations requiring compliance specialists; the result is to prevent newcomers from entering the business, thus ensuring that the business will be dominated by the existing giants.

The same logic applies to tax policy, and this can be recast as: ‘The best thing one can do for rich people is to thicken the tax environment with regulations requiring compliance specialists; the result is to prevent newcomers from entering the “rich people” business, thus ensuring that the “rich people” business will be dominated by the existing wealthy.’ Which is what I’ve been saying all along about Warren Buffet and his fellow travelers.

Read it.

Panasonic says it has created an artificial photosynthesis system that can convert carbon dioxide into organic fuels, and can do so as efficiently as plants. The system creates energy by passing sunlight or concentrated light through a nitride semiconductor photoelectrode, and then uses this energy to convert carbon dioxide and water into formic acid. The system may seem inefficient with a rate of just 0.2 percent, but it’s the most efficient system of its kind so far, according to Panasonic. Previous attempts to create a similar mechanism had a limited efficiency due to their complex structures.

It doesn’t matter. The enviro-nazis will find some objection to it, and seek to embody that objection in appropriate regulations — their objective isn’t to save the environment but rather to suppress industrialization, and this invention will merely allow industrialization to continue.

An Informative Chart.

Read it.

On Friday, George Will wrote a harrowing column about the Justice Department’s prosecution — courtesy of the Environmental Crimes Division — of Nancy Black, a marine biologist. Black captains a whale watching ship. Finding herself under investigation for “harassment” of a marine mammal, the alleged harassment consisting of whistling at whales to keep them near the ship for a while, she submitted a tape of the incident. Black edited the tape slightly to highlight the whistling, according to Will. The feds found no harassment, but indicted Black for editing the tape, calling this a “material false statement” to federal investigators.

They also charged Black with feeding killer whales. But, according to Will, what Black actually did was photograph the killer whales eating a whale they had already killed. Her only contribution to the feast was to cut a hole in one of the floating slabs of blubber and, through the hole, attach a rope to stabilize the slab while a camera on a pole recorded the whales’ underwater eating.

Will notes that the federal persecution of Black has crippled her scientific career, cost her more than $100,000 in legal fees so far, and might see her sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Read it.

Charles Moore reviews Radical by Maajid Nawaz.

Read it.

A gang of thieves dressed as knights and armed with a sword and axe robbed the organisers of a medieval festival in France.

Sounds very authentic to me.

Read it.

Yeah, what?

In the States the meaning of Anglo has evolved as various waves of people were assimilated. The term was first used to distinguish Protestant Americans of largely British (though also Dutch and German) stock from Irish Catholic immigrants, many of the former emphasising their Englishness in reaction to the newcomers. In the early twentieth century it was sometimes used by American leaders who felt a bond with Britain, such as Woodrow Wilson, especially when that country was in conflict with Germany. But later Anglo-Saxon (and Wasp) came to mean people of north-west European Protestant ancestry, as opposed to the immigrants of the 1880-1920 wave, Catholics and Jews from south and east Europe. Nowadays it can mean all “non-Hispanic whites”.

By that definition the implications of Romney’s adviser could be “we are white, Obama isn’t”. But if this was dog-whistle racism, then Obama’s 2008 campaign was a blaring Klaxon horn of race. Forget the “post-racial candidate” (© the entire mainstream US and European media), Obama was in reality the “multi-racial” candidate, one who signified the end of white demographic dominance. That’s post-racial in the sense that the majority are becoming a minority, but it would be absurd to pretend that race was not a huge factor in the election of this not-very-experienced junior senator – illustrated by the fact that 96 per cent of African-Americans voted for him.

Can you spell ‘double standard’? Of course you can … if you dare.

America’s vast contradictions and hypocrisies concerning race still rest on the idea that some groups are supposed to be post-racial, while others are encouraged to celebrate their identity, and to fight for the interests of their group. For example, lots of self-appointed Hispanic leaders want America to be more Hispanic, to have more of their countrymen. No one in the media accuses them of racism or chauvinism, and instead presents people wishing to maintain the status quo as hatemongers. Yet why is it necessarily more wrong for Anglo-Americans to want the country to be more full of people like them? Some people advancing the interests of their group are racists; some people advancing the interests of their group are anti-racists.

These days, ‘racist’ is just a synonym for ‘white’.

And why is it acceptable for every ethnicity in America to take pride in its roots, apart from the ethnic group that founded the 13 colonies, bequeathed it their language and laws, and established the political philosophy and liberal institutions? Even if actual English blood accounts for less than 10 per cent of American DNA, the Anglo political identity of America is deep. As David Hackett Fischer pointed out in Albion’s Seed, the cultural influence of the initial founders of a society can vastly outweigh their genetic input.

Yeah — but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order… what have the Romans done for us?

The Other McCain blows the whistle.

Zoning is the closest thing to fascism most Americans will ever know, and it’s remarkable how local governments use zoning laws to limit the rights of the little guy while rewarding the wealthy and well-connected. Big developers who know how to work the system can almost always get whatever they want from zoning boards, while the small property owner is at the mercy of politicians and bureaucrats.

True that.

Read it.

 CNN represents the passive-aggressive Left. MSNBC is unrestrained id, but CNN can never fully surrender to its liberal impulses. It tries to maintain a fig leaf of neutrality. But CNN can’t get through the day without betraying what it really thinks, often in underhanded ways. Thus, when CNN did a story on Chick-fil-A today, what did it focus on? The merits of the controversy? The fact that more than one Democratic government official has threatened to violate the company’s constitutional rights, because its CEO is opposed to gay marriage? No. In a dog whistle to its liberal audience, CNN focused on the fact that Todd and Sarah Palin, along with thousands of other Americans, tweeted photos of themselves eating at Chick-fil-A….

Read it.

Barack Obama’s White House has been forced to admit that it did return a bust of Sir Winston Churchill to British diplomats, after describing such claims as “100 per cent false”.

Perhaps I need a new category, ‘Obama’s Minions Caught Lying Again’.

Read it.

Oxford University has rewritten the laws governing its strict academic dress code following concerns that they were unfair towards transgender students.

Can’t see how. Women wear pants without, apparently, feeling that their sexual identity is impaired. I guess ‘transgender’ is the new ‘gay’.

Paul Gottfried is pretty hard-core.

Although Cathy and his staff have affirmed their determination “to treat every person with honor, dignity and respect—regardless of their belief, race, creed, sexual orientation or gender,” this statement, which reads like something from the Department of Education, is apparently a ruse. According to gay-advocacy organizations The Huffington Post and The New York Times, as well as leading Democratic pols such as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, Cathy is trying to stamp out (you guessed it!) “tolerance.” Every time someone bites into one of his sandwiches, the customer promotes hate. Presumably if one bites twice, one gets cholesterol poisoning and causes a recurrence of Auschwitz.

Thin edge of the wedge, man, thin edge of the wedge. Gotta guard against that shit.

The government social engineering that was congressionally approved in the 1960s for advancing blacks and women has now been extended to other victim groups, and there’s no way to stop the process. It just goes on and on, with ever more intrusive tactics being applied to bring everyone into line. This is not fascism, with due respect to my libertarian friends who insist that it is. Mussolini, for all his rhetoric about the state’s majesty, would never have engaged in the present insane attempt to stand society on its head by placing homosexuals beyond criticism and by pushing the private sector into showering them with jobs. The alternative left does not really object to such arrangements provided they can elect Romney as our next president and get on with important things such as carpet-bombing Iran and filling patronage jobs with party loyalists.

Quin Hilyer reacts to Jonathan Chait’s thesis that the reason Republicans dislike Obama is racism.

What a steaming load of diseased dung this is. The time has come to call this “racism” wolf cry what it really is: the Left’s version of McCarthyism. As with the original, the game is to accuse adversaries of something awful, and awfully untrue, purely for political effect, to cause a political wound. (The difference is that at least McCarthy had some small basis for his vilely overstated accusations, as the Venona documents have since shown; this cry of racism, here as in so many of the Left’s uses of it in recent years, has not even a shred of truth to it.)

Yup.

The reason Barack Obama’s outlook is alien to the American tradition is not because he is black; it is because he was mentored by a Communist, raised by leftists, inculcated with foreign values in Indonesia, befriended (and willing befriending of) some of the vilest radicals and terrorists on American soil, studied and emulated the evil Saul Alinksy, and consciously chose (by his own testimony in his crafted, semi-fictionalized “autobiography”) the persona of a man disaffected from and antagonistic to many of the values historically adopted and admired by most Americans.

Yup again.

Freeberg nails it once again.

If the economy improves, people prosper. If people prosper, Barack Obama sees them as the problem. If a leader thinks people are the problem when they’re making the economy stronger, clearly the economy cannot improve under His leadership.

Read it.

When work crews pulled open a broken BART escalator at San Francisco’s Civic Center Station last month, they found so much human excrement in its works they had to call a hazardous-materials team.

While the sheer volume of human waste was surprising, its presence was not. Once the stations close, the bottom of BART station stairwells in downtown San Francisco are often a prime location for homeless people to camp for the night or find a private place to relieve themselves.

Five of the nine escalators that weren’t working at BART stations on Wednesday were in downtown San Francisco, said Jim Allison, a BART spokesman. While there are many reasons a BART escalator can break down, the beating they take at night is among the most acute.

If you go to San Francisco, be sure to wear a flower in your hair … and maybe some Depends.

Read it.

Dimock, Pa. is famous within the anti-fracking movement for being the city from the movie Gasland where residents had to drink exclusively from bottled water because the well water was so contaminated by nearby fracking sites that you could light it on fire. However, yesterday the EPA released data that actually indicated that samples in the private drinking well water “did not indicate levels of contaminants that would give EPA reason to take further action,” according to the EPA’s press release. The EPA did find dangerous levels of arsenic, barium, and manganese in five homes (out of the 64 sampled), but all of these substances “are also naturally occurring substances” which, in any case, can be reduced by available treatment systems.

In other words, the enviro-nazis and their ‘progressive’ co-conspirators are lying like rugs.

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

Read it.

A study released this week by the Joint Economic Committee found that the death tax fails to produce any recognizable benefits and significantly hinders economic growth in the U.S.

The study shows that the death tax fails to achieve any of the goals that it was intended to achieve.

Specifically, the death tax has: (1) reduced the amount of capital stock in the U.S.; (2) significantly hindered entrepreneurial activity; (3) prevented economic mobility; and (4) raised an insignificant amount of revenue.

Well, duh. The purpose of the death tax, as everyone with two brain cells to rub together knows, is to confiscate wealth from those who, being freshly dead, are in no position to complain, so that the government can spend it for it’s own purposes. It’s robbery, pure and simple. ‘Your money belongs to us; we’ll decide how much we let you keep.’

Read it.

Crapitalism is alive and well in … wait for it … Michigan.

This summer, 13-year-old Nathan Duszynski wanted to make some money to help out his disabled parents—his mom has epilepsy and his dad has multiple sclerosis. So he decided to open a hot dog stand. He saved $1,200, mostly money made by mowing lawns and shoveling snow. He checked with the city to make sure he didn’t need any licenses or permits, even going to city hall in person with his mom. And then he bought a cart. (Yep, that’s hot dogs from Nathan’s, for those who are keeping score at home.)

He arrived to set up shop on his first day and 10 minutes later, a zoning official arrived to shut him down. The problem: The cart, which is in the parking lot of a sporting goods store, is on the edge of official downtown commercial district of Holland, Michigan. The city bans food carts in that area in order to minimize competition for the eight tax-paying restaurants a couple of blocks away.

As it happens, I’ve been to Holland. It’s a lovely town, but not exactly a booming metropolis. And frankly (ha!), after an evening of Blue Motorcycles Butch’s Dry Dock, a hot dog would really have hit the spot. The city says it is willing to work with Nathan, but keeping food carts out of the small, walkable downtown area is pretty much the same thing as banning food carts altogether. Nathan and his family obviously know that: The hot dog cart is now for sale.

After all, we can’t have some punk kid wanting to help out his disabled parents affect the profit margins of Established Businesses who no doubt have better connections at City Hall. So much for the American Dream in Obama’s America.

Mark Helprin has some fun with a Voice of the Crust.

Every day it seems, reason and the English language are ravished by contemporary American politics.

For example, as there is no God-given tax rate, when the rate increases it is an increase, not the expiration of a decrease. Were it the latter, one could say that the Bush tax cuts were not tax cuts but the expiration of the Clinton increases, the Clinton increases the expiration of the Reagan cuts, the Reagan cuts the expiration of previous increases, and so on. Such is the thinking of non-effervescent minds that see as a cut a lesser increase in spending than they advocate, or urge passage of a stupendous, juggernaut, congressional bill so that they can find out what’s in it.

‘Progressives’, like their siblings the Socialists and Communists, realize that controlling the meaning of language perforce controls the means of debate. Hence the use of loaded terms like ‘piracy’ and ‘theft’ for copyright infringement, and ‘gay marriage’ for a relationship that has never been characterized as marriage in all of human history.

The nation appears more and more able to eat whatever words are shoved down its throat. It is told, and does not protest, that Islam is a religion of peace. Islam is indeed a religion of peace, but it is also, quite demonstratively and throughout the world in proof after proof day after day, a religion of war.

(And that’s not to mention usage of ‘racism’ for being disagreeable to Muslims, which aren’t a race even by the expansive standards of the Left.)

Perhaps the most brazen language diktat has been the mischievous switch of political colors. Stalin would hardly believe it, but blue now supposedly signifies the left and red the right. According to Wikipedia and the Washington Post, so it must be true, the change came in 2000 courtesy of MSNBC and NBC’s “Today” show. It next migrated to David Letterman at CBS, and then went bacterial. The spirit of the change is reminiscent of the cable TV directory that read, “The World’s Best Ho . . .” when space was clearly available for “tels.” One can imagine the high-pitched giggling at this naughtiness. Saddling your political rivals with a symbol to which they have been historically opposed is an even better and naughtier joke. Either it was that or numbing cluelessness.

That’s always puzzled me. Republicans are Red? Not even. Democrats are Blue, the traditional color in Europe for Reaction? Guess their admiration for Europe stops at that water’s edge.

Red is the mobile color of passion and engagement, and blue the staid color of reason and detachment. As you may recall, the left champions radical change spurred by boundless compassion, while the right wants to check the passions of human nature as they flow into politics, and to balance opposing powers in a stable equilibrium. Over time, natural affinities for the two colors have been confirmed by adoption—communist, socialist, and labor parties almost always favoring red. But if NBC says to, we had better jump into line. Most of the country has already done so without a thought. Who says “old media” is vestigial? They are highly adaptable, or, as they might say, “Better blue than dead.”

After all, if the Voices of the Crust say it, is it not our duty to believe it?

Read it.

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

The Justice Department’s internal watchdog said Thursday that eight current or former officials at one of its divisions steered jobs to children and other relatives, violating laws and regulations that forbid nepotism.

He said that the eight executives made the violations by “improperly manipulating the hiring process to ensure that their own children or the children of other JMD employees were appointed to DOJ positions. In at least one case, we found that two senior officials simultaneously attempted to assist each other’s relative in securing DOJ employment.”

The Children of the Crust shall never lack for bread.

Read it.

Of course he did. God forbid that any enviro-nazi should be answerable for his behavior.

German authorities detained Captain Watson following a request from Costa Rica. The Central American country claimed that his behaviour during an incident on the high seas in 2002 had threatened the safety of the crew of a Costa Rican fishing vessel.

The Sea Shepherd has also been involved in number of violent confrontations with Japanese whaling vessels, and last year three members of its crew were held on board a Japanese ship after boarding it to deliver a letter protesting against the whale hunt.

Read it.

The officers ordered the 18-year-old called Marie-Louise to produce her identity card around midnight outside a mosque in the southern French city of Marseille, which has a large Muslim population.

She was wearing the niqab that leaves all but the eyes covered in contravention of a 2010 law banning wearing any face-covering veil in public.

The woman refused, saying: “I don’t obey the laws of the French Republic” and allegedly bit one of the officers. Scuffles then broke out with around 50 people present including the woman’s partner. Three officers were lightly injured.

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

A reminder that, no matter where Muslims may be living for the time being, their first loyalty is always to the Ummah of Islam, and they feel entitled to ignore any law that is not based on shari’ah.

Read it.

“The diversity of transitions between note combinations – roughly speaking chords plus melodies – has consistently diminished in the past 50 years.”

The “timbre” of songs – the number of different tones they include, for example from different instruments – has also become narrower, he added.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

This Monday, July 30, 2012 will mark the 47th anniversary of the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid. On that day in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson journeyed to Independence, Missouri to sign the enabling legislation in the presence of former President Harry Truman. It was the dawn of “The Great Society” and the American nanny state.

Financially, it’s been downhill ever since.

Medicare was designed to provide medical services to those over the age of 65. Medicaid was designed to provide financial assistance to the poorest among us who can’t otherwise afford medical services. From the inception of these programs, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement have dominated their operation.

Read it.

Which one is the girl? Oh, right, the one with the Adam’s apple.

Despite many creative ideas, Brendan Greene-Walsh and Leila Rathert-Knowles have yet to hit on a good solution for their last name, should they get married.

My heart breaks for them. I’m surprised that they decided to have a common married last name. How sexist.

Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna illustrates the recent discussion here about how mentally challenging it can be toeing the ‘progressive’ Party Line.

The rules vis-à-vis “race” that govern public discourse are extraordinarily complex and Byzantine. They are never explicitly stated, and are thus very difficult for even the most well-informed person to understand. Most high-minded and politically correct people run afoul of them at one time or another, since there are so many lines in so many places that cannot be crossed.

Virtually every day a politician or celebrity makes an error and inadvertently breaks the rules of discourse about “race”. The TV viewer is then subjected to the degrading spectacle of the offender’s repeated pitiful apologies, protests of good intentions, and abject groveling before the media outlets that shine the klieg lights on him. None of it does him any good, of course. Once the bucket of “racist” tar has been emptied over one’s head, the sticky goo remains indefinitely.

These rules only apply to white people, however (and to Jews, who for practical purposes are considered at least as “white” as I am). “Brown” people are given an unlimited supply of “Get Out of PC Jail Free” cards, and may thus say whatever they like about race with impunity.

Read it.

Amtrak wants six tracks dedicated to high-speed rail that would shorten the time it takes to get from Washington, D.C. to New York City’s Penn Station by an hour. The proposed first phase of the project, which would take place between 2013 and 2017, would, according to the plan, cost $200 million to $300 million.

But as the Post notes, “Amtrak and its partners have said little about how to raise the $6.5 billion to $7.5 billion it estimates the upgrades would cost.” There has even been some talk of taxing various economic activity at Union Station to raise funds to fund the expansion project.

Amtrak is mostly used by people wanting to move between the Other Left Coast power-centers of Boston/New York/Philadelphia/Washington without subjecting themselves to the TSA. Can’t say that I blame them. Unfortunately, many of them are Functionaries of the Crust and have no problem having the rest of us pay for their convenience.

Read it.

In the United Kingdom, the Royal National Institute of Blind People reports that more than half of the nation’s National Health Service trusts are restricting cataract surgery. The institute says the trusts have imposed tougher standards for offering the surgery, standards that could force patients to wait until their vision has seriously deteriorated before getting surgery.

Don’t you just love that government health care? Don’t you just wish that America had a system like that?

Steve Sailer doesn’t much like the attitude of the Voices of the Crust.

The Anglo-Saxons have turned out to be the biggest winners in history. Their language dominates the world in 2012.

And the reason the Anglo-Saxons won is because they figured out a lot of better ways to do things, such as the British parliamentary system. And a big reason they figured out better ways is because they valued freedom of discussion and tried less hard than most people to shut down all criticism and unwelcome speech.

But, the way things work in the modern world is that it’s hateful and poisonous for anybody to be publicly proud of being related to a winner. To win these days, you should proclaim your victimhood whenever possible, which gives you moral authority to silence your critics.

Thus, in practice, Barack Obama rivals George H.W. Bush as the WASPiest-acting President of my lifetime, vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, playing golf, and reading Marilynne Robinson novels about Congregationalist ministers. But, if he were Brooke Osborne instead of Barack Obama, would he have ever been considered Presidential Timber? Would anybody have ever even noticed him? Of course not. Among people with a mellifluous prose style, Obama is not the most perceptive observer, but he;s got that figured out, as shown by naming his autobiography after the deadbeat African father he barely knew. Thus, Obama was offended to discover that his nasty but sensible rich African grandfather had spent his life as a head servant for the English colonists, studying the ways that made them rich and powerful, and applying them in Kenyan countryside.

In theory, we now admire losers. (In reality, we admire power and money, same as always.)

Read it.

Famed for its strong tidal currents, Cobscook Bay is an ideal location to pilot the (relatively) green energy initiative. The TidGen Power System will initially generate enough electricity to power only 75-100 homes, but there are plans to expand the project to provide electricity to 1,200 homes and businesses. Given Eastport’s population was just 1,131 in 2010, the project will likely make it one of the most energy-sustainable cities in the country.

No mention of how cost-effective this project might be, which suggests that it isn’t, very, and they carefully avoided mentioning that so as not to Interrupt the Narrative.

Read it.

Of course he does.

Speaking to a nation raw from its latest mass shooting, US President Barack Obama vowed on Wednesday to pursue “common-sense” measures to make sure mentally unbalanced people cannot get their hands on guns.

We already have such measures in place. And, from everything I’ve seen in the media, James Holmes exhibited no decisively significant symptoms of ‘mental unbalance’ before the attack. So I’m thinking that what the Obamassiah has in mind are criteria whereby somebody who, oh, say, doesn’t support ‘gay marriage’ will be deemed sufficiently ‘mentally unbalanced’ so as to justify denying such a person the right to own a gun.

Laugh if you will; the Chick-fil-A situation suggests that it could happen — ThoughtCrime is alive and well among big-city Democrats … of which, ad perpetuum rei memoriam, Obama is one.

Read it.

All in blue states, naturally.

Researchers at MIT have developed a new computer model that shows that it’s not necessarily the busiest airports that are the biggest hubs for spreading viruses during a pandemic. The study looked at the 40 biggest airports in the United States, exploring how they effect the spread of disease in the early days of an outbreak, incorporating factors like where the airports are located, their waiting times, and how they’re connected to airports in other cities. According to the study, airports in New York and Los Angeles topped the list, though Honolulu wasn’t too far behind.

Read it.

Dina Frank, 7, has cerebral palsy and needs leg braces and crutches to walk. So she couldn’t go through the metal detector when her family tried to fly out of New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. Instead, Transportation Security Administration agents searched her. Her parents say they warned agents that Dina is also developmentally disabled and frightened by the procedure but the agents still handled her aggressively. After searching Dina and allowing the family through security, a supervisor later told them that agents hadn’t followed proper procedure and forced the girl to be searched again, making the family miss their flight.

I’m wondering how much the sheeple will keep putting up with this shit.

Read it.

ATM card skimming is hardly a new activity, and neither are card skimmers that continue to get smaller and more discreet. As Brian Krebs of the Krebs on Security blog reports, though, a new development out of Europe has now crossed a key, and potentially troublesome threshold. The European ATM Security Team (otherwise known as EAST) has discovered a new type of wafer-thin card skimmer in use in at least one unnamed European country that’s small enough to fit directly in the ATM’s card slot — that’s as opposed to most current skimmers that can be well-disguised but generally sit on top of the card slot. As you can imagine, that makes it considerably more difficult to spot for even the most attentive ATM users, but Krebs notes that the skimmer still requires a secondary device like a camera or keypad overlay to record a person entering their PIN.

Read it.

It’s said that most Americans under the age of 30 reflexively dislike movies made before 1970, especially those that were shot in black-and-white. If this is so, I suspect it’s because such films portray an America that no longer exists. Those of us who are a couple of decades older than that well up with intense nostalgia at the sight of that reassuringly familiar place, even the uncomfortable districts that harbored desperate souls hurtling toward a rendezvous with film-noir death. After all, that’s the place where we grew up. For those under 30, though, black-and-white America is an impenetrably strange land peopled with creatures who look like human beings but live in a parallel universe of fedoras, dial telephones, three-channel TV sets and more or less nuclear families.

The key was the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. That’s when the rot set in, and it’s been downhill ever since.

My father, WWII vet, habitually wore a hat when he went outside until well into the 70s. He bought me one when I was about 14; it sat on the ledge in our front coat closet. Don’t know what ever happened to it.

Read it. And watch the video.

The new system is more complex than a chain and gears and consists of a rope and pulley on each side of the bike. The rotation of the pedals forces arms at each side to swing forward and backward on its shaft. When moving forward, the arm pulls the driving wire that is wound around a drum on the rear wheel, forcing the wheel to rotate. The arms at each side alternate so that when one is moving forward the other is moving backward.

To quote Sonic Charmer: ‘I didn’t read these. Somebody else made that happen.’

Ancestry by DNA.

10 Skills People Want to Learn From YouTube.

17 Tips To Make Your Life Easier,

Read it.

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

Khalfan specifically mentioned that members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the conservative pan-Islamic social movement that has become highly influential in Egypt and other parts of the Arab world, were leading the plot.

‘Conservative pan-Islamic social movement’? Try ‘Radical international jihadist terrorism movement’.

Read it.

Pardon me while I guffaw.

Read it.

I love the range of political opinion in Britain. They have the Labour Party, which is like our Democratic Party, and then they have the Conservative Party, which is like our Democratic Party.

Read it.

 The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) today came out with new scores for Obamacare.  The big statistic that caught our eye was that Obamacare is now officially a $1 trillion net tax increase.

Read it.

The survival of a woman shot in the head during the Colorado cinema massacre has been hailed as a “miracle” after a shotgun pellet traversed the precise course of a brain defect she was unaware she had.

According to her family Petra Anderson, 22, a musician, lived because she had a rare genetic condition that left her with a small channel of fluid running from the front to back of her brain.

Read it.

John Atta Mills, the president of the gold, oil and cocoa-rich West African country of Ghana, has died suddenly from an unspecified illness.

Possibly lead poisoning. I hear that happens a lot in the area.

Read it.

You knew it had to happen.

We live in a litigious society. That’s not a secret. So it’s no surprise that, in the aftermath of the Aurora, Colorado Batman shootings, lawsuits will be filed. But as always the question is: who do you sue? Well, if the linked TMZ article is accurate, Torrence Brown Jr., who was in the theater, but not directly injured (though a friend of his was killed), has lawyered up, hiring an attorney named Donald Karpel to sue Warner Bros. for making the movie too violent. He’s also apparently planning to sue the theater for not properly guarding the emergency exit, which is apparently where Holmes left and re-entered with the weapons. Oh yeah, and the doctors of shooter James Holmes for not properly monitoring him.

Actually, I’d be inclined to sue the theater for making it a ‘gun free zone’. But that’s me. And I suppose that the theater doesn’t have pockets deep enough to make a really fat target.

This certainly seems like a frivolous lawsuit. Going after Warner Bros.? For what? That’s likely to get laughed out of court. This seems like a clear case of a “Steve Dallas lawsuit,” named for the famous Bloom County comic strip in which lawyer Steve Dallas gets beat up by Sean Penn after trying to take a photograph of the star. He then explains why the proper target of a lawsuit is not Sean Penn, but the “Nikolta Camera” company, because “a major corporation with gobs of liquid cash … was criminally negligent in not putting stickers on their camera which read, ‘warning: physical injury may result from photographing psychopathic Hollywood hotheads.”

Since Mr Brown is a Person of Color and the shooter was a Person of Pallor, I’m astonished that he didn’t add a layer of alleged racism to his suit. (Hey, there’s still time to add it later. When the Crust keeps telling you you’re a victim, you tend to believe them and see oppressors everywhere.)

The good news is that Warner Brothers can afford some pretty fancypants lawyers, certainly better than anybody Mr Brown might engage. The bad news is that I’m sure Mr Brown’s lawyer is counting (probably accurately) on Warner Bros. being willing to pay them a substantial-but-to-a-megacorp-trivial sum to go away.

No doubt some future high school guidance counselor will include among his recommended career plans ‘attend a public function that is shot up by some deranged wacko and then sue everyone in the same ZIP code’. It’s certainly more likely than hitting the big time in professional sports, and life in the ge-hetto doesn’t offer a lot of options in the Obama Economy.

South Bend Seven sums it up.

One hundred people are given apples, flour, sugar, butter, etc.

Some people make delicious apples tarts and pies that everyone wants.

Some people eat their apples, and manage to make passable loaves of coarse bread which others will eat.

Some people eat their apples and have no idea what to do with the baking material.

Some people leave the apples out to spoil, and the butter to go rancid, and everything goes to waste.

How do you conclude from this that the people who made the delicious pies needs to pay for everyone’s ingredients next month?

And that’s all you really need to know on the subject.

I have nothing to say about Penn State.