… and I find that pretty scary.

Oh, and if you’re not reading OUR VALUED CUSTOMERS every day, the angels will weep for you.

Read it.

Manssor Arbabsiar, aka Mansour Arbabsiar, pleaded guilty today in federal court in the Southern District of New York to participating in a plot to murder the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States while the Ambassador was in the United States. Arbabsiar, a 58-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen holding both Iranian and U.S. passports, was arrested on September 29, 2011, at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. He pleaded guilty today before U.S. District Judge John F. Keenan.

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The West sighed in relief when Rimsha Masih, the 14-year-old Christian girl arrested in Pakistan on August 16 for allegedly burning pages of the Quran, was finally released. Yet the West remains clueless concerning the graphic abuses—including rape and murder—Christian children in Pakistan routinely suffer, simply for being Christian.

But remember, the real problem is Islamophobia.

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Customers who spend $1,999 (£1,240) or more on an engagement ring at the Jewellery By Harold shop in North Liberty, Iowa will receive a free rifle.

Well, depends on the rifle. Remington 700? I’m impressed. Cheap Chinese AK-47 knockoff? Not so much.

Steven Landsburg is not afraid to say what everyone ought to be thinking.

So Alvin Roth wins the Nobel Prize for, among other things, figuring out the best way to allocate kidneys subject to the constraint that you’re too damned dumb to use the price system.

Next up: A Nobel prize in medicine for figuring out the best way to prolong your life while repeatedly shooting yourself in the head.

And that tells you pretty much everything you need to know on the subject.

Read it.

Police in Tanzania have arrested 126 people after last week’s attacks on churches in the main city, Dar es Salaam, a police commander has said.

Angry Muslims vandalised and torched five churches after a Christian boy reportedly urinated on a Koran.

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?

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The area is called the National Petroleum Reserve because in 1976 Congress designated it as a strategic oil and natural gas stockpile to meet the “energy needs of the nation.” Alaska favors exploration in nearly the entire reserve. The feds had been reviewing four potential development plans, and the state of Alaska had strongly objected to the most restrictive of the four. Sure enough, that was the plan Interior chose.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says his plan “will help the industry bring energy safely to market from this remote location, while also protecting wildlife and subsistence rights of Alaska Natives.” He added that the proposal will expand “safe and responsible oil and gas development, and builds on our efforts to help companies develop the infrastructure that’s needed to bring supplies online.”

The problem is almost no one in the energy industry and few in Alaska agree with him. In an August 22 letter to Mr. Salazar, the entire Alaska delegation in Congress—Senators Mark Begich and Lisa Murkowski and Representative Don Young—call it “the largest wholesale land withdrawal and blocking of access to an energy resource by the federal government in decades.” This decision, they add, “will cause serious harm to the economy and energy security of the United States, as well as to the state of Alaska.” Mr. Begich is a Democrat.

When Obama says ‘energy independence’, what he means is ‘completely blocked off from access to energy’ — not the sort of ‘independence’ that most people are looking for.

Read it.

Understaffed food stamp fraud prevention units and lax anti-fraud security on Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards have created a thriving underground market where food stamp recipients illegally sell and trade their taxpayer-funded benefits, often using online websites like Backpage.com, Craigslist, or social media.

That is one of the findings of a new report by the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) examining how the poverty industry has become a massive profit center for politically-connected corporations like JP Morgan, who have made at least $560,492,596 since 2004 to process the EBT cards of food stamp recipients in 24 states and two U.S. territories.

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

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

Read it.

My favorite example of Mr. Heinegg’s examples, though, has nothing to do with Jewish religious terminology. It occurs at the end of the same “Talmudic argument” after Jesus’s death when he appears to his disciples and asks — seeking to prove that he is flesh and blood and not an apparition — whether they have anything for him to eat. (In the King James, this goes: “Have ye here any meat?”) In Einspruch’s Yiddish, the question is: “Hot ir do epes tsu esn?”

The untranslatable epes is marvelous. Epes is one of the homiest words in the Yiddish language. It means “something” or “anything,” but it can also mean “a bit of,” and it makes Jesus sound as if he were saying, “Hey, you guys, can you spare me a bite to eat?” How could anyone have thought he was an apparition after that?

Read it.

 A £3.2 million award for “excellence in African leadership” has failed to find a winner for the third time in six years after the prize committee decided that none of the continent’s leaders fitted the criteria.

Tell the truth — where is there a continent that could pass that test?

Read it.

… keep in mind also Hayward’s First Law of Environmental Energy Politics: there is no source of energy, no matter how clean, that environmentalists won’t oppose if it becomes cheap and abundant.  We’ve seen this turnabout on natural gas, but also see widespread environmentalist opposition to wind farms and solar power facilities.  It will happen to algae if it becomes practical.

Read it.

Jaroslav Flegr is no kook.

I don’t know — he certainly looks to me like a kook.

Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia?

Wouldn’t surprise me. Look at some of the things cats do on YouTube.

The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes.

You know how pregnant women are, rooting around in cats’ litter boxes all the time. (Doesn’t ‘T. Gondii’ sound like a rap singer?)

T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage.

I guess homosexuals are cat people. Who knew?

But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents.

Women and minorities hardest hit, no doubt. (See above.)

He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.”

Perhaps it even explains how Obama got elected President. Lord knows we could use a scientific explanation for that one.

T. gondii, reports Sapolsky, can turn a rat’s strong innate aversion to cats into an attraction, luring it into the jaws of its No. 1 predator. Even more amazing is how it does this: the organism rewires circuits in parts of the brain that deal with such primal emotions as fear, anxiety, and sexual arousal

And that would explain the success of Bill Clinton, If You Know What I Mean And I Think You Do. This theory is looking better and better.

The far more common victims of parasitic mind control—at least the ones we know about—are fish, crustaceans, and legions of insects, according to Janice Moore, a behavioral biologist at Colorado State University. “Flies, ants, caterpillars, wasps, you name it—there are truckloads of them behaving weirdly as a result of parasites,” she says.

And that’s not to mention college students. You can’t tell me that there isn’t some sort of parasitic mind control going on there.

Consider Polysphincta gutfreundi, a parasitic wasp that grabs hold of an orb spider and attaches a tiny egg to its belly. A wormlike larva emerges from the egg, and then releases chemicals that prompt the spider to abandon weaving its familiar spiral web and instead spin its silk thread into a special pattern that will hold the cocoon in which the larva matures. The “possessed” spider even crochets a specific geometric design in the net, camouflaging the cocoon from the wasp’s predators.

Any resemblance to the effect of Unions on Congressmen is purely coincidental, of course.

Americans will be happy to hear that the parasite resides in far fewer of them, though a still substantial portion: 10 to 20 percent.

Ah. Undecided voters. It all fits.

Researchers had already observed a few peculiarities about rodents with T. gondii that bolstered Flegr’s theory. The infected rodents were much more active in running wheels than uninfected rodents were, suggesting that they would be more-attractive targets for cats, which are drawn to fast-moving objects

Compare the relationship between small business owners and government. Frightening.

Flegr was especially surprised to learn, though, that the protozoan appeared to cause many sex-specific changes in personality. Compared with uninfected men, males who had the parasite were more introverted, suspicious, oblivious to other people’s opinions of them, and inclined to disregard rules. Infected women, on the other hand, presented in exactly the opposite way: they were more outgoing, trusting, image-conscious, and rule-abiding than uninfected women.

Cat people. I’m tellin’ ya….

Read it.

 Izhar Gafni, 50, is an expert in designing automated mass-production lines. He is an amateur cycling enthusiast who for years toyed with an idea of making a bicycle from cardboard.

He told Reuters during a recent demonstration that after much trial and error, his latest prototype has now proven itself and mass production will begin in a few months.

Bonus points if you can determine what ‘game’ is ‘changing’ here.

Read it.

We have the technology — or will soon.

Read it.

I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere, although it’s not exactly clear what it might be. Maybe it’s just Don’t Live in Britain, which is always a good rule of thumb, although I’m sure the same thing is equally likely to happen in any major metropolitan area in the U.S.

Read it.

 The vehicle – called the Quadski – goes up to 45 miles (72 kilometers) per hour on land.

To go in the water, the driver presses a button and the wheels fold into the sides in five seconds. The Quadski also goes 45 miles (72 kilometers) per hour in the water.

You know you want one.

The Other McCain is on the case.

If Obama thinks he’s gonna throw Hillary Clinton under his bus, he’s going to find out the hard way his bus ain’t big enough.

Since we knew that the Republicans were going to run the Next Guy In Line in 2008, my wife and I voted in the Democrat primary. I voted for Hillary under the theory that, if we’re going to get a Democrat President, it might as well be a qualified Democrat President — say what you will about the Clintons, they have a talent for finding and sticking to the middle of the road. My wife says she voted for Barack under the theory that, if you’re picking the other side’s candidate, pick the bigger fool and hope that even the Next Guy In Line might win. We all see how that worked out.

Read it.

This is the only writeup I can find that isn’t just a copy of the wire service ‘press release’.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

 Let’s try this hypothetical: two blue-eyed identical twins raised together apply to the University of Texas. They have equal GPAs, test scores, extracurricular activities and so forth. They only differ in one thing. Seven of their eight great-grandparents are German. But the other one is the King of Spain. Does this entitle them to check the Hispanic/Latino box on their UT applications?

Hundreds of Habsburgs await the decision with bated breath….

Read it. And try not to laugh.

Walk into most tech companies and you’ll be greeted by the same picture – a room made up entirely of men. You can practically smell the testosterone.

Uh, no. Programmers are not known for excessive levels of testosterone — those guys do football and sales, not Javascript.

The technology industry is still struggling to shake off the image of the male, pizza-guzzling, antisocial nerd – a perception that initiatives like this month’s Ada Lovelace day – which celebrates the role of women in technology – and Lady Geek’s “Little Miss Geek” campaign, are striving to change.

And, of course, pizza-guzzling (how do you ‘guzzle’ a pizza?), antisocial nerds are justly famed for their testosterone. Watch a couple episodes of CHUCK and you’ll be convinced.

Although women fill close to half of all jobs in the US economy, they hold less than 25% of jobs in the science and technology sector, according to a government report. In the UK, the problem is even worse: currently only 17% of jobs in the technology sector are held by women. Both numbers are declining year-on-year.

Conspicuous by its absence: Any explanation as to why this is a ‘problem’; it’s just assumed, in the sure and certain knowledge that anyone reading a BBC article will know, just know, that it is.

Can you say ‘political agenda’? I’m sure you can.

So long as shiny new gadgets keep flying off the shelves, what does it matter who’s making them?

A good question. Let’s see whether it gets answered. My money is on No.

It’s all very well appealing to a tech chief exec’s sense of social injustice – but the bottom line is that they are running a business.

Gee, there’s that pesky political agenda again — the definition of ‘social injustice’, and how it differs from just plain ol’ ‘injustice’, is left as an exercise for the reader (no pun intended).

What do they care about gender diversity, really?

Indeed, why ought anyone to care about ‘gender diversity’ (i.e. Jobs For The Girls)? Again, one of those Politically Correct Good Things That All Right Thinking People Want Without Knowing Why.

We ultimately need to appeal to the thing that matters most: their wallets.

Feel free to wonder about who the ‘we’ is in that sentence. Hint: It’s probably not you, unless you get your news from MSNBC.

That’s why every chief executive should be made aware of the following stat: tech companies with more women on their management teams have a 34% higher return on investment.

Repeat after me the magic phrase: ‘Correlation does not imply causation’. I guess they don’t teach logic in Gender Studies 101.

The reasons are obvious.

Are they really? Really?

Diversity is important in any industry, but is especially relevant when it comes to technology.

Why? No discussion, just assertion. After all, we’re preaching to the choir here. It seems plausible that diversity of products is important, and perhaps diversity of approaches, but I know of no peer-reviewed studies that hook this up uniquely with two X chromosomes.

Tech is the way that world talks to each other. People have never emailed, liked, commented, called, messaged and tweeted more than we are doing right now. And guess what? Half of all those people are women.

And guess what? They seem to be using the current male-created tools just fine. (Men, just to use one example, don’t typically spend a lot of time posting cat videos on YouTube. Yet there they are.) So how are women uniquely qualified to create products for women to use? Is there a secret handshake or IP address or something?

It’s not that we believe women are better or more effective than men – they just simply provide a different point of view, something that is vital when bringing a new product to market.

And that’s why marketing tends to be dominated by females — certainly the marketing departments of every company I’ve ever worked for seem to be run that way. Why do we especially need women writing code in order to create products that appeal to women? ‘Sharon, would you buy this program?’ ‘Hell, no.’ ‘What would you buy?’ ‘Something that makes it easier to put cute videos of my cat on YouTube.’ ‘Okay, boys, there’s our product spec. Let’s get to it.’

What special skillset do women as women bring to the creation of these products? The answer is not provided.

Well, we could do this sort of barrel-fish-shooting all day, but my fingers are getting tired.

(Oh, you might want to look for any mention of the author’s technical credentials. All I see is a celebration of her ability to get her opinions into print — not exactly the sort of person I’d hire to do a web site or a search algorithm. Perhaps the smell of testosterone gave her the vapors.)

Read it.

Read it.

How many do you know?

Read it.

Not that they won’t ride that horse for another century or so; look at how much mileage (and cash) ‘progressives’ have gotten out of the Civil Rights industry.

Arlen Specter has died.

I have detested Arlen Specter ever since he came up with the ‘magic bullet’ theory that so corrupted the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of President Kennedy. He did many evil things from thence until he was thrown out of the Senate in 2010, but that was the worst.

Read it.

It’s amazing how much Darth Vader resembles the government in his approach to ‘deals’.

Read it.

HealthBridge Management and CareOne, related companies that own and operate nursing homes in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and two other states, filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against the New England Health Care Employers Union, also known as Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 1199NE, and United Healthcare Workers East, also an affiliate of SEIU.

The lawsuit claims the unions violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act through the use of threats, sabotage, and intimidation in a “shake-down” to coerce the companies to accept union demands. The health care companies charge that SEIU’s use of the help of politicians and liberal activists to intimidate them amounted to criminal extortion.

Why is it that, whenever you see a picture of SIEU people demonstrating, they’re always all fat and ugly? Where is Julia Roberts?

Read it.

The Department for Work and Pensions set up its auto-enrolment scheme this month. The policy obliges companies to enrol all staff into work pensions and is designed to give up to 11?million employees a private pension for the first time.

Estimates from the department suggest that companies will look to save £2.6? billion of the annual cost of the pensions by capping wage rises for their staff.

History of a government program:

1. “Wouldn’t it be great if everybody had X?”
2. “Yeah, but they’re too stupid to do X on their own.”
3. “No problem! We’ll just pass a law making their employer’s  pay for it! What could go wrong?”
4. “Well, if we have to pay for X, then we can’t pay for Y. Sorry.”
5. “But that’s not what we intended!”
6. “Well, then, don’t make us pay for X.”
7. “I’ve got a better idea — we’ll pass another law making you pay for Y as well! Win-win!”
8. Repeat until employers run out of money and all the ‘beneficiaries’ lose their jobs.
9. Politicians retire to someplace sunny with generous benefits paid for by taxpayers.
10. Jobless people eat their gruel while some old reactionary tells them the one about the Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs.

They never learn that when they vote for people to give them free stuff, the free stuff has to come from somewhere.

 “The reality is that the money has to come from somewhere. You can’t just magic it.”

Read it.

 Technologies like NFC, RFID and QR codes are quickly becoming a normal part of everyday life, and now a group from Carnegie Mellon University has a fresh take on close-quarters data it calls acoustic barcodes. It involves physically etching a barcode-like pattern onto almost any surface, so it produces sound when something’s dragged across it — a fingernail, for example. A computer is then fed that sound through a microphone, recognizes the waveform and executes a command based on it. By altering the space between the grooves, it’s possible to create endless unique identifiers that are associated with different actions.

You’ve heard of storing data in the cloud? Well, we’re going to store it on the road. We have the technology.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

 Kombucha is a home brew favorite with the seitan-and-seaweed set, thanks to the a host of (unverified) health benefits some believe confers.

You’d think that the multi-culti bureaucrats in California would be down with that. But you’d be wrong.

The California kid originally got fingered for the container his mom packed the tea in: a glass bottle protected by a foam sleeve. (Aficionados say the acidic tea shouldn’t be packed in plastic or metal.)

Yeah, God forbid that a California child should use a recyclable glass container rather than plastic that started out in some Arab oil well. But wait, there’s more.

But when school officials found out what was inside the verboten receptacle, they freaked out. The kid spent the whole day in the school office. At one point they called in a police officer. The vice principal suggested that the kid may be required to transfer schools and tried to enroll him in alcohol abuse counseling course aimed at teens. Then the infraction was reported to the school district and the kid was suspended for 5 days.

Babies, don’t let your mom pack your lunch on the Left Coast.

The kid’s mom got wind of what was going on and wound up getting the suspension revoked, but it’s on his record and the school district may yet choose to take action.

For lo, the sins of the parents descend to the children even unto the fourth generation.

Welcome to Progressive America, kid, where personal freedom is a vague memory and you get punished for who you are rather than what you do.

Read it.

Under pressure from the Education Department, which investigated it over “racial disparities” and “disparate impact,” the Oakland, California, school system has agreed to impose “targeted reductions in the overall use of student suspensions; suspensions for African American students, Latino students, and students receiving special education services; and African American students suspended for defiance.” See Agreement to Resolve Oakland Unified School District, OCR Case No. 09125001, page 14, Section VIII(c)(iii). These “targeted reductions” are racial quotas in all but name. (“Disparate impact” is when a process affects one racial group more than another, despite having no racist motive, such as when whites have higher average scores than minorities on a standardized test.)

Welcome to our modern, race-blind society, where the content of your character is directly correlated to the color of your skin, by government decree. Be careful not to step in the diversity.

Read it.

It turns out, surprise, surprise, that high returns were actually linked to high levels of risk (not to mention liquidity risk).  And that the management fees at hedge funds and the like are much higher than for low-cost index funds and the like.  And the hedge fund managers collect 20% of the up-side return and a percentage of the assets under management (they don’t reimburse for downside returns though, of course).

Sort of makes you wonder why, if these funds are so risky and expensive while returning below-market returns, universities persist in investing so much money in them.

Sort of makes you wonder why people are willing to entrust such people with the education of their children.

Read it.

I wouldn’t have been able to resist the temptation to call this “Every Dog Has His Day … in Court”; which, I suppose, is why I’m not a ‘journalist’.

Read it.

Democrats are all about feminism — so long as women stay on the Democrat plantation.

“The fact that they use this theme of Martha McSally in a kitchen cooking up recipes is…overtly sexist and insulting to any woman, but it certainly doesn’t fit specifically with me,” she said. “For crying out loud, I served 26 years in the military. I was too busy shooting 30 mm out of my A-10 at the Taliban and al Qaeda to spend any time in a kitchen.”

My kinda girl. I’d vote for her, if I lived in Arizona, which thank God I don’t.

Read it.

Yet if it were Muslims fleeing from Christians, the headline ISLAMOPHOBIA would be all over the front page of America’s newspapers.

And we don’t even have to mention that, gee, the Christians were there first.

Look at North Africa from Suez to Casablanca — that was all Christian, before the Arab conquerors got there. Yet where is the complaint about ‘occupation’ when Muslims are doing it?

I’d like to hear one of the scruffy slackers who make such a noise on Columbus Day about how Americans are Illegal Immigrants apply that same logic to the Arabs in the Maghreb. But it ain’t gonna happen.

Read it.

Fortunately, they were Sunnis, not Christians. It would be tragic to find Islamophobia in Pakistan.

Read it.

If you believe inflation is under control, then answer this: Where can you get a dozen eggs for a buck?

Nowhere, not even if you own the chicken.

For decades economists have warned about the dangers of deflation. The ongoing double-digit, multimarket decline in real estate prices should horrify us, we are told. Even our language has been edited to reflect this mentality; the phrase real estate recovery is a happy-sounding euphemism for a reinflation of housing prices. Yet everywhere you look, Americans are happy to do the deflation dance.

I wouldn’t mind a little deflation if it meant I could pay 25 cents for a candy bar rather than a buck.

It is well that experts remind us deflation is terrible. Otherwise we might grow too fond of it.

Some of us already are.

Read it.

Egypt unveiled a proposed draft of a new constitution Wednesday amid criticism from liberals and human rights groups that the document is tilted toward Islamic law and endangers the democratic ideals of the uprising that last year overthrew Hosni Mubarak.

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

Article 36 stipulates that “the state shall take all measures to establish the equality of women and men in the areas of political, cultural, economic, and social life, as well as all other areas, insofar as this does not conflict with the rulings of Islamic sharia.”

Hole, meet truck. Truck, meet hole. Drive, truck, drive.

Human Rights Watch criticized the provision as “not consistent with international human rights law.” In a report this week, the organization said that the proposed draft “contains many loopholes that would allow future authorities to repress and limit basic rights and freedoms.”

Okay, somebody explain to me how this is any better than it was before. At least under Mubarak we were getting value for your money.

“The draft constitution defines citizens as those whose identity is primarily Islamic, and, secondly, nationals of the country. In this conception of citizenship, the state aims to control and hegemonize citizens’ visions, stances and beliefs, working to entrench them and produce standardized citizens.”

Perhaps they could get Barack to play Big Brother there, once his gig in America is over.

Read it.

Ron Gissendaner, a manager at Sprague’s Sports in Yuma and a federal firearm licensed gun dealer, told the RGJ it was because the federal prosecutors wouldn’t take the ATF’s cases. He and his staff worked well with the ATF to make sure guns were sold to good guys, not bad guys.

The Yuma ATF was having a positive impact on the town and stopped gun trafficking across the border. Since the prosecutors wouldn’t take these cases, the agents quit. Mr. Gissendaner said one agent quit and is working at a local law enforcement agency in another state. He also said that it’s tough to report suspicious activity in the area. Now people have to travel to Phoenix to report criminal activity, which is three hours away.

EcoCharge

Do the Right Things at the Right Time

Super Rope Cinch

LarkLife

Hands-Free Video Phone. Plenty of room on top of that head for a helmet. Just sayin’.

How to Survive an Atomic Bomb. Hey, it could happen.

Your Phone’s Camera = Microscope.

How to Get Better Sleep After Using a Computer All Day Long

Freeberg has some thoughts on the subject.

It’s completely obvious that across time, the definition of the “poor” is changing. You can live in a two-story house with a garage with two nice cars in it, and if the payments and the mortgage cause you some indigestion then that means you need to vote in some politicians who “care” about you and will give you some perks so you can “make ends meet.” I hear a lot of complaining about a “vanishing middle class” and it seems to me the people doing the complaining are the people who are doing the vanishing: If you’re not rich you must be poor, in the sense that you need this government to give you material things it forcibly took away from other people, otherwise you’re boned.

And the definition of “looked after” or whatever, likewise, is changing. In my world, you’re either making it or you’re not. We use this as information, to figure out whether or not we’re on the right track. This mindset of mine seems to have swung out of date by, oh I dunno, maybe as much as a century…and I’m not sure exactly when, how or why. But it isn’t a bowl of soup or a hunk of bread anymore. Obama gonna buy you a cell phone. Obama gonna put gas in your car and pay your mortgage. Obama gonna send you back to school. Subsidies, grants, loan guarantees, deductions, exemptions, ObamaCare waivers, targeted tax cuts, the sky’s the limit. Everyone bitches up a storm about the tax code being too complicated but very few people seem to genuinely care about it.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Check it out.

Watch it.

What peaceful, happy people! Wouldn’t you just love some as neighbors?

Read it.

Well, his dad was rich, and that helped.

And he went to Harvard, and that helped.

And he’s been paid by the taxpayers all his life, and that helped.

And he got in on the ground floor of the Global Warming scam, and that helped a lot.

Genuine supporters of clean energy ought to be as irked at these sorts of stories as climate-change skeptics are, because when a company’s competitive advantage is “early warning from the Obama team,” the companies whose competitive advantage is better technology rather than better relations with the Obama administration are the ones that get left behind.

Hey, it’s all in who you know — and what party you belong to.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

I’ve never understood what these stickers were trying to communicate. ‘I have a baby here so I can be a jerk in traffic and you have to accommodate me’? ‘There’s a baby in here so if I get in an accident be sure to look for it in the wreckage’? ‘If I do something stupid it’s probably because I’m cooing at the kid so give me a break’?

Read it.

Of course, this is still only half of the amount of the reward offered for the murder of the fool who made the ‘anti-Mohammed’ video of which Barack and Hillary are so fond, so it’s sort of a mixed message. Still, it shows that their hearts are in the right place, which is its obvious objective.

How politics became a business.

Political ‘consultants’ — corrupting our politics (for a modest fee) since 1933.

Of course, since it’s The New Yorker, Republicans are the villains of the piece (all the specific Bad Examples cited are Republicans, like that Enemy of Mankind Nixon (boo, hiss); no mention of the Clintons, James Carville, or Paul Begala, much less of Tommy Boggs), and the examples are all stuff that Right Thinking People Support While Cretinous Republicans Oppose, like compulsory health insurance (‘But they turned the President’s sensible, popular, and urgently needed legislative reform into a bogeyman so scary that, even today, millions of Americans are still scared.’), but it’s still an interesting read, if only for the way in which they point the Finger of Indignation at slanted tendentious writing while practicing the same thing themselves.

Check it out.

Not as much as you might think.

THE gold medals that will be awarded in London this year will be the biggest and heaviest handed out at any summer Olympics. At 400 grams (14 ounces), the equivalent of having a large tin of baked beans hanging round your neck, they will be more than twice as heavy as the average of the previous five games, and almost 17 times heavier than at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm.

On the other hand, the 1912 games were the last one where gold medals were made entirely of gold. Now they consist mainly of silver with a thin coat of gold. Winners in London are advised not to bite too hard on their medals, as they will have a gold content of only about 1.5%. Host cities’ organising committees decide the exact design and composition of medals but the International Olympic Committee sets certain rules: gold medals must have a 92.5% minimum silver content and contain at least six grams of gold. In London, copper will make up the rest.