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 Parents of students at England’s Gartocham Primary School were excited to learn that Alan Bell, the chief starter of the London Olympics, would be firing his starter’s pistol for races at the school’s annual sports day. Local health and safety officials were not excited. They banned Bell from firing the pistol, saying it could frighten the children.

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It may be, as some maintain, that the U.S. is the most litigious country on earth. But at least it’s not this bad.

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 When you label someone an “illegal alien” or “illegal immigrant” or just plain “illegal,” you are effectively saying the individual, as opposed to the actions the person has taken, is unlawful. The terms imply the very existence of an unauthorized migrant in America is criminal.

That’s because it’s a fact. If you are in this country contrary to the law, you are illegal and a criminal. That’s just a fact. Anyone who objects to being called an illegal immigrant can avoid the whole problem by STAYING HOME. It’s not hard.

In this country, there is still a presumption of innocence that requires a jury to convict someone of a crime. If you don’t pay your taxes, are you an illegal? What if you get a speeding ticket? A murder conviction? No. You’re still not an illegal. Even alleged terrorists and child molesters aren’t labeled illegals.

That’s because there’s a difference between what you are and what you are labelled. If you commit a crime, you are a criminal, whether or not you are ever convicted of that crime. Our courts have a presumption of innocence based on the legal effect of their proceedings, not on the existential nature of what you do. If you murder somebody, you’re a murderer, whether or not you ever get convicted — or even accused — of the crime.

This is the sort of intellectual dishonesty that lawbreakers — and those who support lawbreaking — perennially use to try to weasel their way out of the consequences of their lawbreaking. If you don’t like the law, have it changed. If you can’t get it changed, then you aren’t entitled to work your way around it by attempting to pervert the language.

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Why is it that some technologies cause moral panic and others don’t? Why was the introduction of electricity seen as a terrible thing, while nobody cared much about the fountain pen?

…

“The first push-back is going to be about kids. Is it making our children vulnerable? To predators? To other forms of danger? We will immediately then regulate access. I don’t want to seem cynical because there is a reason why we worry about children, but I do think you can tell that’s where it’s going to start.”

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Many will wonder what the fuss was about. The answer concerns the clarity of a sentence. As Lynne Truss proved with her massive bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which was at heart about the accurate placement of commas and apostrophes, a lot of people care about such things. I’m one of them. To judge by the mail, many of this column’s readers are, too.

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Many of the sounds we hear every day are entirely fabricated by engineers to persuade us to buy things.

Hundreds of items have their acoustics deliberately tweaked to make us happy, according to Trevor Cox, professor of acoustic engineering at the University of Salford.

The dastards. Oh, sorry … I was thinking of journalists. Carry on.

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A first-aid kit found on a 2,000-year-old shipwreck has provided a remarkable insight into the medicines concocted by ancient physicians to cure sailors of dysentery and other ailments.

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By next year, beer bought in the U.S. may be more likely to come from a single company than from all the rest combined. That could be bad news for America’s beer drinkers — potentially higher prices for some of the U.S.’s most popular brews and possibly even fewer mainstream brands — if regulatory agencies don’t get involved first.

OMG! We’re doomed! Help us, government bureaucrats! You’re our only hope!

People actually get paid to write this swill.

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To hear automakers and environmentalists tell it, electric vehicles (EVs) are the greenest and cleanest solution to personal mobility. But in his book Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism, author Ozzie Zehner argues that EVs are more symbolism and marketing than environmental and fossil-fuel saviors. And in many cases, EVs are actually worse for the environment than traditional gas-powered vehicles.

To prove this, Zehner, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, points to what he views as the fuel-inefficient process of manufacturing EVs, and claims that they don’t make a big difference in greenhouse-gas emissions. He also contends that electric cars won’t protect the U.S. against future oil price fluctuations, as many claim, and that it’s a fallacy that prices for EVs will fall as the technology matures. He also maligns tax subsidies and government spending that support EV production as misguided. But two well-respected alternative powertrain reporters take issue with most of Zehner’s and the book’s arguments against EVs.

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A priceless 12th-century illustrated guide for pilgrims has been recovered by police a year after it was stolen from the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain.

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California will devote $48.3 billion to education in its next fiscal year, and yet Gov. Jerry Brown still wants citizens to increase their tax payments to the state. This, despite the fact that the state ranks 47th in the nation in education. Meanwhile, the City of Los Angeles spends $6 billion. How on earth can this much money be spent and yet result in such terrible schools?

The problem is obviously systemic, yet nobody ever has the courage to dive deep into the system, tear out all the problems, and reform it. Instead, we get another year in which LAUSD bellows that it cannot handle the budget cuts coming its way, so it cuts school days and fires good teachers and – of course – implores voters to approve more taxes.

Look for … the Union label …. (Not that the kids can read it.)

Scott Johnson points out that there is nothing new under the sun.

On July 9, 1858, Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas gave a campaign speech to a raucous throng from the balcony of the Tremont Hotel in Chicago. Abraham Lincoln was in the audience when Douglas prepared to speak. Douglas invited Lincoln to come join him on the balcony to watch the speech. In his speech Douglas rang the themes of the momentous campaign that Lincoln and Douglas waged that summer and fall for Douglas’s Senate seat.

Douglas paid tribute to Lincoln as a “kind, amiable, and intelligent gentleman, a good citizen and an honorable opponent,” but took issue with Lincoln’s June 16 speech to the Illinois Republican convention that had named him its candidate for Douglas’s seat. In that speech Lincoln had famously asserted that the nation could not exist “half slave and half free.” According to Douglas, Lincoln’s assertion was inconsistent with the “diversity” in domestic institutions that was “the great safeguard of our liberties.” Then as now, “diversity” was a shibboleth hiding an evil institution that could not be defended on its own terms.

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At some point, all teachers realize they are playing Whack-a-Mole in reverse, that the moles are never all up. Any new learning seems to overwrite or at bestconfuse the old learning, like an insufficient hard drive.

That’s when they get it: the kids were taught. They just forgot it all, just as they’re going to forget what they were taught this year.

All over America, teachers reach this moment of epiphany. Think of a double mirror shot, an look of shocked comprehension on an infinity of teachers who come to the awful truth.

The bell curve is there, like it or not, and by definition half of all kids are below average.

Teachers know something that educational policy folk of all stripes seem incapable of recognizing: it’s the students, not the teachers. They have been taught. And why they don’t remember is an issue we really should start to treat as a key piece of the puzzle.

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How is this a surprise? All of the populist rhetoric out of Washington is just handwaving to impress the Great Unwashed and get the Fool Vote. Now more than ever, in an age of disintermediation and freely-flowing information, ‘Wall Street’ depends on ever-increasing thickets of government regulation to safeguard their position as gatekeepers to the financial markets.

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

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When one thinks of the Hamptons, what jumps to mind are masters of the universe and their mansions by the sea. But a strong, steady stream of immigrants has been flowing to the area for years, drawn by a service economy that demands hedges be trimmed and houses be cleaned. In the Springs, a hamlet in the town of East Hampton, where most of the houses are small and the year-round population is relatively large, the Hispanic population has tripled in the past 10 years — and tension has emerged.

The problem with the Upper Crust is that they need the Lower Crust to support their SWPL lifestyles. The native Underclass is increasingly ignorant, feckless, and dishonest, so they’re forced to rely on immigrants, legal and il.

 Some longtime residents of the Springs and similar areas complain that homes are being illegally crowded, that houses with half a dozen cars parked outside are a blight on the street, and that the many children living inside are overwhelming the local schools and causing property taxes to rise.

In other words, the Lower East Side has translated to the Hamptons, and the middle class people who are the target of the perennial conspiracy between the upper class and the lower class don’t like it very much.

Hey, guys, welcome to my world. You voted for Obama, so suck on it.

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Actually, it’s the people who have to deal with them who are doing the suffering.

I’m suffering from Wishing to Punch a Democrat in the Face Disorder. Where do I go to sign up for government benefits?

I no longer find Penny Arcade sufficiently entertaining to waste space on it. So I’m deleting the link.

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Printing a chocolate heart is easy enough, but how about an actual organ? There are folks working on it, but it turns out those veins of yours aren’t exactly a breeze to replicate. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and MIT may have found a semi-sweet solution — dissolving a sugar lattice in a batch of living Jell-O. The research team uses a RepRap 3D printer and a custom extruder head to print a filament network composed of sucrose, glucose and dextran which is later encased in a bio-gel containing living cells. Once the confectionery paths are dissolved, they leave a network of artery-like channels in their void. Tissue living in the gel can then receive oxygen and nutrients through the hollow pipes.

Eric Raymond points out the fatal flaw.

But it all goes pear-shaped on one sentence: “Open systems and networks aren’t always better for consumers.” This is a dreadful failure of vision and reasoning, one that is less forgivable here because libertarians – who understand why asymmetries of power and information are in general bad things – have very particular reasons to know better than this.

In the long run, open systems and networks are always better for consumers. Because, whatever other flaws they may have, they have one overriding virtue – they don’t create an asymmetrical power relationship in which the consumer is ever more controlled by the network provider. Statists, who accept and even love asymmetrical power relationships as long as the right sort of people are doing the oppressing, have some excuse within their terms of reference for failing to grasp the nasty second, third, and nth-order consequences of closed-system lock-in. Libertarians have no such excuse.

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According to federal regulations, you may not, in fact, stick a feather in your hat and call it macaroni.

Trust the Nanny State to have an official definition of macaroni.

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“The Locavore’s Dilemma” argues that the benefits of eating local have been vastly overstated by food activists and its serious detriments swept under the rug. The tone is distinctly upbeat, no doubt because being a gleeful debunker is fun but also because the two authors are resolutely cheerful about the world’s food situation.

Invincible ignorance of economics in service of a political/social agenda is all the rage these days; ‘locovores’ are merely the latest hippy-dippy nonsense.

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

To quote John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia: ‘Get a government job!’ Oh, and be black or Hispanic — that will help.

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Nato trains and fights alongside the Afghan security forces against the Taliban.

The training mission’s motto is “shoulder to shoulder” and many staff wear Afghan flag badges as a symbol of their commitment.

For those Afghan troops to then turn around and shoot dead men who have travelled thousands of miles to enforce the peace is a terrible blow to trust and morale.

What was it that Bugs Bunny always used to say? Oh, yeah: Suckerrrrrrrrrrrrrrr….

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Michigan males intent on celebrating the Fourth of July holiday with a few liveners are advised that when the time comes to send the booze back to the brewers, it’ll be the urinal, rather than the beer, that’s doing the talking.

The Office of Highway Safety Planning (OHSP) is asking bar and restaurant owners in Bay, Delta, Ottawa and Wayne counties to deploy “interactive urinal communicators” as part of a state-wide clampdown on drink-driving.

As soon as sozzled punters get down to business, the motion-sensing device’s female voice advises: “Listen up. That’s right, I’m talking to you. Had a few drinks? Maybe a few too many?

“Then do yourself and everyone else a favour: Call a sober friend or a cab. Oh, and don’t forget to wash your hands.”

The Nanny State in action.

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Pakistan’s new prime minister has started to make good on his promise to end the crippling blackouts that are blighting the country by adding guaranteed supply to his own home.

Hey, gotta start somewhere. Obama would do the same.

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Well-to-do people are taking advantage of the city’s long-protected practice of limiting rent increases to preserve affordable housing by using their cheap apartments as weekend getaways.

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Sometimes it is profitable to live in a blue state.

In one instance, research conducted by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found that four sisters with 17 children bagged $540,000.00 in taxpayer monies since 2006 by simply staying home and babysitting for each other.  The most shocking part: it’s perfectly legal.

“It’s a loophole,” said Laurice Lincoln, administrative coordinator for child care with the Milwaukee County Department of Health and Human Services. “Do we have concerns about it? Yes, it can be a problem. But if it’s allowed, it’s allowed. We really can’t dispute it.”

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V. Kerry Smith and Carlos Valcarcel Wolloh, economists at Arizona State University, take a look at the effects of the Clean Water Act, enacted 40 years ago in 1972 by President Nixon: “we find average water quality in U.S. lakes is at about the same level in 2011 as it was in 1975.”

Not so’s you’d notice. Nixon was still a shit, for this and other bad legislation.

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A spokesman from Wiltshire Police confirmed: “A male walked into the offices of David Nolder and Co in St John’s Street, armed with a weapon, and shot a male.

“The offender drove off in a car but was arrested at approximately 3.35pm without a struggle by armed officers in Rowde.

Gee, I guess those strict British laws against firearms really saved the day, huh? If the victim had been armed, it could have turned into a real bloodbath. Too bad for him, but it’s the public we have to look out for.

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Outside his kitchen, the customers, most of them Vietnamese, are expecting authentic Vietnamese cuisine. German Sierra, born in Honduras, makes sure they get it.

Wonder when the Washington Post will realize that this shoots Identity Politics right square in the ass?

“It is hard to find a chef now — a Vietnamese chef,” said Thi Quach, owner of Viet Taste. “Most young Vietnamese people now, they tend to stay in school and they do professional jobs, so they don’t want to stay in the kitchen, and the older generation are getting old already.”

Gee, don’t they call that … assimilation?

A new study suggests that recent Asian immigrants also tend to have higher levels of education, the majority enter the country legally and they are more likely to hold employment visas than immigrants from other countries. By contrast, a larger percentage of Hispanic immigrants have arrived undocumented and with lower levels of education, making them more likely candidates for lower-paying jobs.

Which is why we want more Asians and fewer Hispanics. Duh.

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Now I’ve got nothing (aside from the obvious) against models, but while my husband invariably gets to spend dinners making intelligent conversation, I’m forever getting stuck with the Model Wife. These women aren’t genetically stupid, but years of being prized for nothing but their looks have led to a certain amount of decay in the head department. Wit and intellect are like muscles which, left too long unused, wither and die. Nobody has ever asked the Model Wife what she thinks of Obamacare or contemporary art. These women think a Syrian intervention is a new cosmetic procedure. That’s a little unfair, you say – what about Model Husbands? Well, there aren’t many about, accomplished women being less inclined to marry brainless trophies.

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As relations with local forces continue to deteriorate the deaths mean that a quarter of all British fatalities this year have been caused by Afghans soldiers with seven murdered at the hands of allies.

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Islamist rebels in northern Mali smashed four more tombs of ancient Muslim saints in Timbuktu on Sunday as the International Criminal Court warned their campaign of destruction was a war crime.

Not that they plan to do anything about it other than wring their hands, of course.

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You knew it was coming.

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Yeah, yeah, boring ‘inside baseball’ lawyer stuff. But this is important (unless you, like me, have no intention of visiting foreign parts).

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Although Islam and black nationalism share a flame-belching, sword-swinging hatred for Western Civ, it’s an odd pairing when you consider history. American blacks who dump Christianity and shack up with Islam seem to think they’re flipping the bird at the creed that enslaved their ancestors, but they’re only swapping it for a religion that has enslaved their ancestors for far longer.

Like Jews joining the Nazi party because they think that America is being mean to them. There are times when ‘clueless’ is entirely inadequate to describe the situation.

Many historians harp about how the Arab slave trade was far more humane than the transatlantic slaving biz. If only for spite, I’ll focus on what was far worse about it.

For starters, it predated the transatlantic slave trade by at least 800 years and has outlived it for 150 years and counting. Whereas the bloodthirsty hallucinating pedophile sandworm Muhammad (c. 570-632) owned both male and female black slaves, European explorers didn’t even begin dipping their beaks into the African human-cattle trade in large numbers until the 1500s.

Roughly three centuries later, Europeans and their American descendants took it upon themselves to put the kibosh on slavery. In contrast with Christendom, there was never a concerted Arabic abolition movement, and slavery was only formally outlawed in the Islamic world due to intense outside pressure. But slavery still openly thrives in places such as Mauritania and, on the downlow, throughout much of Africa and the Middle East.

If you count human bodies equally, the Arab slave trade likely shackled at least as many Africans as the transatlantic trade and possibly twice as many. Although early documentation is scarce due in part to a deafening lack of written languages below the Sahara, historical estimates range from a low of eight million to a high of 25 million. In contrast, the general consensus is that around 11 million Africans were transported to the New World—yet only a mere 5% of those wound up in what is now the USA, although the USA gets 100% of the guilt-tripping.

History is such an inconvenient thing for the ‘progressive’ mind….

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A steal at $4.6 million. Be the first on your coast….

How to Tie Anything Securely to Your Car.

I reserve the right to correct grammar.

Gary Taubes points out — in the New York Slimes, no less –that what The Government and The Scientists tell us to eat is the worst possible stuff for us.

Color me surprised.

What was done by Dr. Ludwig’s team has never been done before. First they took obese subjects and effectively semi-starved them until they’d lost 10 to 15 percent of their weight. Such weight-reduced subjects are particularly susceptible to gaining the weight back. Their energy expenditure drops precipitously and they burn fewer calories than people who naturally weigh the same. This means they have to continually fight their hunger just to maintain their weight loss. The belief is that weight loss causes “metabolic adaptations,” which make it almost inevitable that the weight will return. Dr. Ludwig’s team then measured how many calories these weight-reduced subjects expended daily, and that’s how many they fed them. But now the subjects were rotated through three very different diets, one month for each. They ate the same amount of calories on all three, equal to what they were expending after their weight loss, but the nutrient composition of the diets was very different.

One diet was low-fat and thus high in carbohydrates. This was the diet we’re all advised to eat: whole grains, fruits, vegetables, lean sources of protein. One diet had a low glycemic index: fewer carbohydrates in total, and those that were included were slow to be digested — from beans, non-starchy vegetables and other minimally processed sources. The third diet was Atkins, which is very low in carbohydrates and high in fat and protein.

The results were remarkable. Put most simply, the fewer carbohydrates consumed, the more energy these weight-reduced people expended. On the very low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, there was virtually no metabolic adaptation to the weight loss. These subjects expended, on average, only 100 fewer calories a day than they did at their full weights. Eight of the 21 subjects expended more than they did at their full weights — the opposite of the predicted metabolic compensation.

In other words, ‘paleo’ diets work.

From this perspective, the trial suggests that among the bad decisions we can make to maintain our weight is exactly what the government and medical organizations like the American Heart Association have been telling us to do: eat low-fat, carbohydrate-rich diets, even if those diets include whole grains and fruits and vegetables.

Boy, I can’t wait until the ‘experts’ are in charge of our health care. Put Mike Bloomberg in charge, he’s an elected official and thus no doubt knows more about what you ought to eat than ANYBODY.

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Turing isn’t the only scientist to have been persecuted for his personal or professional beliefs or lifestyle. Here’s a a list of other prominent scientific luminaries who have been punished throughout history.

I guess the premise here is that scientists get relieved from following the same rules as everybody else … because they’re ‘scientists’? We’re accustomed to artists claiming a pass on such grounds, but this is the first time I’ve heard it on behalf of scientists.

Sorry, guys; the rules apply to everybody.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, is always worth reading.

If you have been born and raised in the USA, race is never far from your mind. Native Americans—people like my kids—have a mental Race Buzzer that goes off in a thousand different contexts and whose purpose is to drown out certain kinds of thoughts. The darn thing’s on a hair trigger. If you were raised in some other place where race was a thing people hardly ever thought about, this is really hard to get used to. Trust me on this.

…

The rule here, the rule I met when it was too late to internalize it, is that you’re not supposed to notice. He’s black, she’s yellow, they’re Jewish. We all know it, but for goodness’ sake don’t mention it.

That’s why all those reports about mobs, gangs, and riots in Philadelphia, Chicago, Peoria, and DC are telling us about “youths,” “teens,” or “thugs.” In the age of cell-phone cameras and YouTube uploads we can all perfectly well see that the perps are black, but it would be a gross breach of etiquette (one I just committed, I guess) to let on that you’d noticed. I just watched a segment of the O’Reilly show titled “Violent Teen Mobs Causing Chaos Across Country.” In the entire 6:15 segment, neither Laura Ingraham nor either of her two guests used any of the terms “black,” “African American,” or “colored.”

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Part of it was that I was simply burnt out. I had spent the better part of 10 years either studying computer science in college or working as a professional software engineer (or both), and I suddenly decided I wanted to experience life outside the cubicle. Living in the woods was a childhood dream of mine, and it seemed like a good time to realize that dream.

But, the other part was that I started to see some fundamental issues with the way the industry and our society are structured. At a personal level, I realized that striving for success and accomplishment didn’t bring me any closer to happiness. And at a societal level, it occurred to me that a system predicated on infinite growth simply was not sustainable. So, I decided to step back, slow down, and rethink my life and my priorities.

Perhaps he’ll be eaten by a bear. We can only hope.

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Healthcare’s hyperinflation has ignited the DIY Health Reformers to declare what amounts to a Declaration of Insurance Independence. While the reformers recognize insurance plays a vital role for managing high risk events (house fire, car accident, cancer), the fee-for-service model underlying insurance in day-to-day healthcare has created what translates into a 40% “insurance bureaucrat tax” that they want freedom from.

I’ve long said that the two major areas of human endeavor that haven’t been properly automated yet are health care and education. We appear to be on the verge of that happening; Khan Academy is certainly a step in the right direction. This article is about another encouraging step.

Unfortunately, ham-handed attempts to dip the current system in bureaucracy and freeze it in place, like Obamacare, may stifle this initiative in the cradle. But maybe not — entrepreneurs are more nimble than politicians, almost by definition, and they might be able to work around it. I hope.

Tech Crunch does something that is Not Safe For Work.

Ever have one of those days where every news story bugs the living shit out of you? Where your faith in humanity ebbs further away with every click? We’re having one of those days.

I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.

Steve Sailer takes a break from annoying the Crust to watch a movie.

Why the hate for the three Transformers movies? For one thing, most critics are frustrated fiction writers, so they normally love writing plot summaries. But recounting a Transformers storyline, which has been molded to make perfect sense to a small boy, seems demeaning. “Did I read all those Raymond Carver stories to get my MFA just to transcribe complicated gibberish about Deceptibots and Autocons?”

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Apparently, the criteria is that a miniature book must be no more than 3 inches tall, which to me is hardly miniature. Most collectors would spurn an otherwise dull book that commanded a premium because it was that unremarkable height, or even slightly smaller. So when there are so many much smaller books around on ABE –although most seem to be boring Victorian or later bibles commanding prices of around $20–I would suggest that unless you’ve got a thing about bibles, you would do well to seek out books of at least 1 – 1 ½ inches high that are interesting in themselves. But don’t expect anything really small to come onto the market. Something like Chekhov’s Chameleon, which at 0.9mm square (about the size of a grain of salt), was, until very recently, the world’s smallest book, until it was trumped by a ‘ book ‘ that can only be read by an scanning electron microscope, are almost always gimmicky. And I suspect that until recently craft technology was unable to come up with anything smaller that a cm high.

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Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.

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Whatever one’s views on today’s Middle Eastern regimes, we can all agree that violent rioting is not a system of governance. But how can raucous street demonstrations be prevented from deteriorating into endless anarchy? The existing methods of suppression are clearly insufficient. Deadly force quickly produces martyrs and often only exacerbates violence. Nor are tear gas, rubber bullets, or truncheons particularly effective. Demonstrators retreat momentarily, regroup, and then pelt police with rocks and Molotov cocktails. This can continue for days, even months. And forget about Mace and Tasers for large crowds. Angry mobs should be able to express their discontent but at some point, enough is enough and politics should replace street violence.

Let me suggest a cheap, nonviolent way to control fanatical Muslims with an appetite for nonstop turmoil—weaponized pork. Muslims hate pork. Merely mentioning pork, let alone physical contact with it, strikes terror into the hearts of even the most committed “living martyr.” When confronting rioting Islamic fundamentalists, pork is perfect.

And there it is.

The beauty of pork-based riot control is its incredible flexibility. For all-purpose crowd dispersal, shotgun shells could be loaded up with bacon bits. Such “pigshot” could quickly break up rowdy demonstrators without harming a flea, let alone damaging the environment. Tanks could be modified into mobile Chinese field kitchens, complete with a traditional large exterior ventilating circular fan. When the enemy is within range and the wind conditions are right, pork strips would be cooked in giant woks. With the scent of freshly cooked pork everywhere, demonstrators will be traumatized. Many of those pork-smelling fanatics will be barred from their own homes, cafes, and other public places. What Sharia-compliant Muslim wife would sleep with a man reeking of filthy swine? Some will have to burn their clothing and take multiple baths—hardly a welcome option in societies averse to daily bathing.

An elegant solution to the problem.