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 Paul and Rachel Chandler have set sail to restart their interrupted tour around the world aboard the same boat on which they were kidnapped by Somali pirates.

Some people just can’t take a hint.

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I guess the theory is that when their jobs are shipped to China they can follow along. Or something.

Public schools in Macon, Ga., and surrounding Bibb County have a lot of problems. Most of the 25,000 students are poor enough to qualify for free and reduced lunch, and about half don’t graduate.

Welcome to Black-Run America. Be careful not to step in the diversity.

Bibb County’s Haitian-born superintendent Romain Dallemand came into the job last year with a bag of changes he calls “The Macon Miracle.” There are now longer schools days, year-round instruction, and one mandate nobody saw coming: Mandarin Chinese for every student, pre-K through 12th grade.

Trying to teach the kids standard English rather than Ebonics is obviously doomed to failure, so lets invest in some trendy foreign language. What’s Mandarin for ‘We be toys ‘n’ shit’?

“Students who are in elementary school today, by 2050 they’ll be at the pinnacle of their career,” Dallemand says. “They will live in a world where China and India will have 50 percent of the world GDP. They will live in a world where, if they cannot function successfully in the Asian culture, they will pay a heavy price.”

And yet they’re making no attempt to teach Hindi, which is the other half of this ‘Asian equation’. Perhaps that’s because Indians are pushing their kids to learn English, which is the default international language of business. But Hindi isn’t as hip and trendy as Mandarin, so it gets ignored; which, in turn, reveals this ploy for what it is: A way to make parents and politicians feel good about themselves while not doing anything effective about training these abused kids for a productive life. And so we end up with FIREFLY, a world in which everyone can speak English and Chinese while living hand-to-mouth. My, what an improvement.

“Bibb County is not known for producing the highest-achieving graduates,” says Macon resident Dina McDonald. “You’ll see that many of them can’t even speak basic English.”

McDonald herself has a ninth-grader in the public schools and says she can imagine some students going into fields where Mandarin could be useful, like international business, technology or law. But with lower achievers, she says, “Do you want to teach them how to say, ‘Do you want fries with that?’ in Mandarin?”

Oh, God forbid that the parents might be consulted in all of this. We’re from the government, and we have a better idea.

“While we do know that Mandarin is a critical language, another critical language here in the United States is Spanish,” Eric Spears says.

Bibb high schools will continue to offer Spanish and French on top of Mandarin, but for most of the elementary kids, it’s Chinese or nothing. Considering the Hispanic population doubled in Georgia over the last census period, the “Why not Spanish?” question is one Dallemand gets a lot.

“My wife is a Latina, and so I fully understand,” he says. But “it is important for communities to educate our children for their future, not our past.”

For that future, Dallemand says, there is no choice but Mandarin Chinese.

And ‘no choice’ is what the Crust is all about.

Bruce Lawson says what we all really believe.

I think of non-GUI programs in the same way as I do about going camping. Some people love sleeping in a tent and getting up in the night to walk in the rain to poo in a hole they’ve dug behind a tree. Not me. I spend a considerable portion of my income on a house with a central heating system and three flushing toilets, so there’s no bloody way I’m going camping. You may think it a badge of honour that you can do “sudo dpkg -i –force-all cupswrapperHL2270DW-2.0.4-2a.i386.deb” from memory. I think you’re burying your turds with a trowel in a thunderstorm.

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The time lenses that were created for this experiment were split time lenses. Essentially, two halves of a lens were placed so that the points met in the middle. There was one split time lens on one side of the cloaked event and another split time lens on the other side. A laser was then passed through the first time lens. This dispersed the light around the events happening between the lenses. The light then passed through the second split time lens and returned to its original phase. So to an observer, it’s as though the events between the lenses never happened.

And you can believe as much of that as you want to, but it’s an interesting notion.

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And, of course, if the Obamas are obsessed with something, you’d better by-God be obsessed with it, too, or the gubmint gonna come down on you.

For the past three years, food has been an issue with the Obamas.  During the recession, they’ve dined in style while others have clipped coupon.  Wagyu beef, anyone?

Michelle made food her crusade, urging Americans to eat expensive, “healthy,” “organic” food (which has now proven to be just as nutritious as non-organic food), even as she was seen all over the world (and the TV) enjoying unhealthy food with gusto.

Although Barack Obama is regularly seen in public eating junk food, his increasing emaciation has led to Tabloids talking about him having an eating disorder.

Sonic Charmer, I think, has the right of it:

My take, it’s a status thing; food/skinniness is one of the last remaining socially-acceptable ways to show off your status. People more secure and/or deeply-rooted in their high status wouldn’t feel the need to indulge in this sort of thing, but the Obamas are relatively new to this stratosphere and so are just feeling their oats. Same goes for all Michelle’s travelling, etc.

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

A Nashville woman was charged with attempted terrorism Friday after investigators said she threatened to hurt co-workers at the South Nashville Dell facility last weekend.

The trouble began when a CEVA Logistics employee said his co-worker Amal Ahmed Abdullahi, 29, of Zermatt Avenue, approached him during his shift last Saturday.

According to a release from Metro police, Abdullahi told the employee that “her people were dying for Allah every day; that she was ready to die for Allah; that this whole country will be Muslim soon; that this country is full of non-believers and that this place (her work place) is full of non-believers; that all unbelievers should die; that her life starts after death; that her life is not here, nobody pays attention to her and she should pick up a gun and shoot all these people.”

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

Read it if you want to, but the headline tells you everything you need to know about the last four years, and it will only get worse in the next four if this turkey is re-elected.

How to Hang Yourself With Statistics

Cassette to iPod Converter

Robert Rogers’ 28 “Rules of Ranging”

Candy Chemistry Set

Walker’s Path Illuminating Belt 

The Serious Eats Guide to Sandwiches

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Back in the old days, immigrants to the United States were expected to assimilate into American society and culture. This meant that after a generation or so they would be indistinguishable from other Americans, except for whatever physical characteristics came with their genetic heritage. They might retain some of the customs of the “old country” within their families, but to all outward appearances they became Americans. They spoke American English as their first language, at home and elsewhere.

Yeah, well, that was then — this is now.

But what is “integration”?

The word has an amorphous meaning when used by the trans-national bureaucrats of the European Union, who seem to prefer that it remain without precise definition.

As far as I can ascertain, an immigrant to Europe is integrated if he:

1.         Learns the local language well enough to converse at work or in places of business, and to fill out social welfare forms.
2.         Refrains from committing as much crime, particularly violent crime, as he might otherwise be inclined to commit. No one expects him to meet traditional European standards of law-abiding behavior, but he should at least keep the larceny and mayhem down to a manageable level.
3.         Beats his wife or daughters only behind closed doors, and without leaving any publicly visible bruises.

And that’s about it. When European politicians lament the “failure to integrate”, they mean that culture-enrichers are not even meeting the above minimal standards.

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Those Republicans! What a bunch of haters!

Mark Siegel resigned Friday from his post in the Palm Beach County Democratic Party, according to the communications director of the state’s Democratic Party, Brannon Jordan.

Oh, wait….

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Crooks have created what’s reckoned to be the first computer virus featuring the Irish language.

Ta se garbh anseo.

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The Maple Bacon Donut … mmmm.

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When terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11, they scared a lot of Americans, and they made us feel existentially less secure.

Yet to place the tragedy in a different perspective: Few have a similar terror of highway fatalities, which kill more than ten times that many people in America every year.

Yeah, well, if your car engine stops, you stop. If your airplane engine stops, you die. Cars typically don’t face the prospect of a religious-fanatic passenger grabbing the wheel and steering you into a crowd of pedestrians.

Following 9/11, U.S. society reacted by constructing a complicated and largely useless “security theater.” Policies give the appearance of keeping control and protecting people against existential threats, but in reality they do very little.

Recently, waiting on line for various checks at an airport, I stood next to a pilot (who also has to go through many of the same checks as passengers). When the TSA personnel were not looking, he rolled his eyes at me and said “You know, I am licensed to bring a gun into the cockpit, but I can’t bring more than three ounces of shampoo!”

Sort of a metaphor for how government employees operate: It’s more important to appear to be doing something than to actually get something done.

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She was given a five-year sentence for each of the ten counts of voter fraud for which she was convicted, but the sentencing judge allowed her to serve the terms concurrently, according to the Tunica Times.

Matthew Vadum, author of Subversion, Inc., notes Sowers’s DNA was found on the inner seals of five envelopes that contained the absentee ballots, and liberal groups like the NAACP and ACORN have had a history of such shenanigans.

Of course she voted them as Republican ballots. Democrats would never do something like that.

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Impossible. Everybody knows that voter fraud is a myth.

Steve Sailer sometimes likes to point and laugh.

 Matthew Yglesias points out that the top 12 executives are all white men at Apple (which, in less than a decade and a half, has gone from down-and-out to the world’s highest stock market valuation). He goes on to suggest how to begin fixing Apple’s problem.

Thank God I sold all my Apple stock in 1999 and used the money to buy Hewlett-Packard stock because HP had appointed Carly Fiorina CEO. As we all know, white men cannot begin to grasp the diverse needs of women and people of color, so how can they sell them computers?

And he’s not very shy about it, either.

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Although Democrats adopted a plank supporting the constitutional overturning of Citizens United for the sake of democracy, they managed to ignore their own party rules and delegate voices this afternoon when amending the party platform. DNC Chairman Antonio Villaraigosa announced the party required a two-thirds vote to amend the party platform. However, minutes after failing to reach the threshold after three separate votes, he awkwardly moved forward and declared the two-thirds threshold had been reached.

At least they’re consistent in ignoring their own rules along with everyone else’s.

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…it seems that the Obama Administration’s “Affordable Care Act” has made health insurance less affordable for North Carolina’s college students.

CNN’s Political Ticker reports that Tom Ross, the president of the University of North Carolina system, informed the university’s board of governors that there would be a significant increase in the cost of university-provided insurance plans that would result in students paying nearly twice as much as they do now.

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

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For Democrats, the end always justifies the means, and rhetoric will always trump reason. The two great orators of the Democratic party of the last 40 years, Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy, were two of the most immoral men who ever graced public life. Clinton will speak tonight, and as always, his horrific history of rape and abuse of women will be ignored so he can pose as a person who really cares.

Just ask Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willie, among others too numerous to name, how much he cares.

But the worst example of all is the Democrats lionizing of Ted Kennedy. In a seven minute video at the DNC, there were plenty of quotes from Kennedy and his admirers that should be seen through the agonized eyes of a young girl, slowly asphyxiating in a car submerged in water, a young woman vainly trying to open the door so she could breathe just one more time, a young woman betrayed by the scion of the country’s most powerful family who left her to die.

Mary Jo Kopechne.

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

Jacob Sullum calls them out.

Last week I faulted the Republicans for the selective reading of the Constitution reflected in their 2012 platform. But at least the folks who put together that platform have read the Constitution (or parts of it); I’m not sure the same can be said of their Democratic counterparts. While the Republicans have a 4,000-word section devoted to “A Restoration of Constitutional Government,” the Democrats give us 1,400 words on “Protecting Rights and Freedoms”—many of which, upon closer examination, turn out to be neither rights nor freedoms. Among the alleged rights that the Democrats promise to defend: freedom from “discrimination in the workplace and other settings,” “paycheck fairness” for women, “job-protected leave for specified family and medical reasons,” “evidence-based and age-appropriate sex education,” government subsidies for Planned Parenthood, and taxpayer-funded health care, including “free access” to “prenatal screenings, mammograms, cervical cancer screening, breast-feeding supports, and contraception.”

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The last U.S. troops left Iraq in December 2011, while Barack Obama was president, but the “status of forces agreement” that governed the departure of U.S. troops was actually negotiated between Iraqi and U.S. officials in late 2008, under the auspices of President George W. Bush.  In fact, none other than the Huffington Post actually pointed out that as president, Obama was actually interested in keeping troops in Iraq past the agreed-upon 2011 deadline, explaining that “the president ultimately had no choice but to stick to candidate Obama’s plan — thanks, of all things, to an agreement signed by George W. Bush.” Just six months before the Bush deadline, Obama tried to foist 10,000 U.S. troops on the Iraqis past 2011.

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A Palestinian man who was denied entry to Israel by security forces stationed at the Hashmonaim checkpoint dropped a bag containing explosives and fled the scene on Wednesday.

A explosives expert who was alerted to the scene found four pipe bombs in the bag, which were then safely detonated. The security forces have launched a manhunt for the suspect.

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

Freeberg nails it yet again.

    Modern liberalism: Some 20 or 30 percent of us who never matured much past middle school, claiming to represent 99 percent, trying to win an election by a tenth of a percent so that some 4 percent of us can tell everybody else how to live, and where to put 100 percent of our money.

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A Polish research institute has developed a board game to teach young people about life under Communism. In the game, which is inspired by Monopoly, players must wait in endless lines at stores for scarce goods. For added realism, they have to put up with people cutting in line and products running out — unless they have a “colleague in the government” card.

Kiwis. Style by the mile.

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Democrats have railed against voter ID laws, and their platform “opposes laws that place unnecessary restrictions” on those seeking to vote, but Democratic National Convention officials will only issue credentials to those who present state-issued IDs.

The DNC’s website says that “all pickup persons must have a state-issued ID that matches the name submitted” to receive credentials. Media members attending the DNC have to present photo IDs at multiple checkpoints.

But even as Democrats require IDs to enter their convention and The Voter Integrity Project discovered there were 30,000 dead North Carolinians still on the state’s voter rolls, Democrats continue to fiercely oppose voter ID laws.

That smell is just Normal Democrat Smell. They always stink like that.

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Members of the Department of Justice’s secretive Community Relations Service or CRS were spotted on the ground this morning in Charlotte North Carolina at the Democratic National Convention by Breitbart.com editor-in-chief Joel Pollak.

Last week, Breibart News’ Jeremy Segal–a.k.a. Rebel Pundit–posted a video showing CRS members assisting anarchist onto a bus after a protest. Segal and other witnesses also saw a CRS member high-fiving one of the protesters.

Looks like Eric Holder has his own little covert operations team.

The CRS made headlines a few months ago when it was used in Sanford Florida to aid protesters and oust the local sheriff in the wake of controversy over the death of teenager Trayvon Martin. According to sources in Sanford, a CRS member is still stationed there.

Well, well.

The Other McCain is having a lot of fun with this one.

It takes a special kind of stupid for a Democrat to lose a statewide race in Massachusetts.

Indeed. It’s always entertaining watching the Democrat hand being bitten by one of their client groups; sort of makes them feel for a while what it’s like being a Republican.

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Apparently the preferred retirement occupation for those who have gotten rich from shuffling numbers around is to stride the highways and byways warning against those evil rich people. (Funny, I don’t see any of them giving the money back.)

Quite frankly, I’d be more impressed if one of these Lame-Stream Media outlets could find a ‘journalist’ who actually knew what the term ‘oligarch’ meant…. Obama is an oligarch. Harry Reid is an oligarch. John Kerry is an oligarch. Vladimir Putin is an oligarch. George Soros is merely a corrupt rich guy.

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 Christians should leave their religious beliefs at home or accept that a personal expression of faith at work, such as wearing a cross, means they might have to resign and get another job, government lawyers have said.

Rather an odd position for the government of a nation with an established church — not that anybody would mistake the Church of England for Christians, of course.

Who’s willing to bet that they would say that to Muslims? Anybody? Didn’t think so.

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The only open question is whether they will be forced to join the SEIU first — one must, after all, follow tradition.

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 The Wikileaks founder breached the conditions by seeking political asylum before he was due to be extradited to Sweden to face sexual assault charges.

A raft of high-profile figures including socialite Jemima Khan, journalist John Pilger, film director Ken Loach and publisher Felix Dennis have all confirmed they raised the cash as security to help free him which a judge ordered be forfeited at an earlier hearing.

Nine high profile backers, including two members of the British aristocracy, a Nobel Prize winner and an academic, were today told at Westminster Magistrates Court they have a month to show why the £140,000 they promised between them if he refused to surrender to the authorities should also not be lost.

Plenty of room for rich fools under the bus. Think of it as evolution in action.

The Other McCain asks the touchstone question.

Who do the enemies of America support, Obama or Romney?

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Well — if you were Canada, wouldn’t you?

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Nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC), which is produced by processing wood pulp, is being hailed as the latest wonder material. Japan-based Pioneer Electronics is applying it to the next generation of flexible electronic displays. IBM is using it to create components for computers. Even the US army is getting in on the act, using it to make lightweight body armour and ballistic glass.

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But you knew that.

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Standard & Poor’s downgraded Illinois’ credit rating on Wednesday, citing “weak pension funding levels and lack of action on reform measures.”  S&P also gave the state a “negative outlook.”

The agency lowered Illinois’ rating from A+ to A. This is the 10th time Illinois’ credit has been lowered during Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn’s tenure and will potentially cost Illinois taxpayers because the state may have to pay more when borrowing money.

Of course, that wouldn’t matter if the state didn’t have to borrow money. Unfortunately, with Democrats in charge, borrowing money is one of the few tools in the state government’s toolbox. And, as Margaret Thatcher famously observed, eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Walter Russell Mead, a scholar who is one of the foremost critics of the so-called “blue state” model, wrote Democrats who defend such an unsustainable governance model — like the one in Illinois — should not be taken seriously.

“With public-sector unions fighting tooth and nail to preserve their cushy benefits and expensive pension plans, old style Dems like FDR, Harry Truman and Fiorello LaGuardia—all of whom thought that public sector unionism was a terrible idea—are looking smarter and smarter all the time, Mead wrote. “The combination of collective bargaining and the power of a focused voting lobby and campaign finance machine has unbalanced the budgets of too many cities and states to retain much appeal to the general public.”

“Blue State = Red Ink” is the prevailing fundamental equation of our time.

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 How did a candidate who drew two million individuals to his inauguration and retained a 13 million-member email list lose that magic?

According to campaign officials, White House aides, members of Congress, top party strategists, labor leaders and progressive advocates, the main reason is that Obama has come to resemble the creature of Washington he campaigned against.

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

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No matter who you are, there is someone out there less interesting than you. Enjoy.

Thomas Sowell blows the whistle.

Sports statistics are kept in a much more rational way than statistics about political issues. Have you ever seen statistics on what percentage of the home runs over the years have been hit by batters hitting in the .320s versus batters hitting in the .280s or the .340s? Not very likely.

Such statistics would make no sense, because different batters are in these brackets from one year to the next. You wouldn’t be comparing people, you would be comparing abstractions and mistaking those abstractions for people.

But, in politics and in commentaries on political issues, people talk incessantly about how “the top one percent” of income earners are getting more money or how the “bottom 20 percent” are falling behind. Yet the turnover in income brackets over a decade is at least as great as the turnover in batting average brackets.

In the course of a decade, the top 400 income earners include a couple of thousand people. The income received by the top 400 (as a statistical bracket) has risen, both absolutely and as a share of all income, even while the average income of the average person who was in that bracket at a given time has fallen by large amounts. How can this be? The short answer is turnover.

Turnover in sports creates no such confusion.

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Shortly after I started Per Square Mile, I produced an infographic that showed how big a city would have to be to house the world’s 7 billion people. There was a wrinkle, though—the city’s limits changed drastically depending on which real city it was modeled after. If we all lived like New Yorkers, for example, 7 billion people could fit into Texas. If we lived like Houstonians, though, we’d occupy much of the conterminous United States.

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Just what the world needs — automated Third World food.

Water-Absorbing Concrete Coasters

Scientific Evidence for Popular Health Supplements

UFO Identification Chart

Mini Microscope For iPhone

12 Supercool Projects You Can Make From Scratch This Weekend

Get Organized With These 5 Handy YouTube Channels

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They say Pope Benedict XVI is preparing to establish a new pontifical academy for the study and promotion of Latin, to be known as the “Pontificia Academia Latinitatis”.

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said the academy will be staffed by “eminent academics of various nationalities, whose aim it will be to promote the use and knowledge of the Latin language in both ecclesiastical and civil contexts, including schools.”

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And then again it might not, but why take the chance? Milton Hershey is your friend.